“What’s the matter?”
“Wait here. I have to get something.”
I went outside to my pickup and got the two L-shaped brackets I’d stored in the glove compartment. Back in the cafe I dropped them on the table in front of Gareth.
“One’s from a tree in the forest at the lake, the other one your father gave to Stan when we were up at your place. They’re the same. The one I found on the tree was the one you fixed a camera to so you could film Marla and me while we fucked for Bill Prentice. I’ve seen the video.”
Gareth folded his arms. “Oh really? And where did you happen to stumble across that piece of cinema?”
“Bill’s cabin.”
“I wouldn’t have thought Bill would be showing it around.”
“He wasn’t home at the time.”
“You naughty boy.”
“I know you set the whole thing up.”
“Courtesy of Marla, no doubt.”
“I figured it out myself.”
“Bullshit.”
“She told me you forced her into it, you prick.”
“Oh, come on, Johnny, we had all this out before. Don’t call me a prick. You abandoned her, she wouldn’t have started hooking otherwise. Just like you abandoned your father, just like you abandoned your brother. Call me a prick? Fuck, man, I’m an amateur next to you. I’d never walk out on my father.”
“But you’d destroy some guy’s life. Why? Because of the fucking road?”
Gareth smiled slyly, though he tried to hide it. “You know how important that road is to us. And you know how it affected my dad when it didn’t get built.”
“Bill’s wife
“That sounds a bit farfetched.”
“I saw the disk in her bedroom when we found her. It was in the machine.”
“Careless old Bill.”
“You really are a fucking psycho.”
“Look, I made the vid to get some leverage on the road. I gave Bill a copy to show him I could fuck him up if he didn’t play ball. And seeing how the council guys came around today, maybe he took the hint. If his wife found it, it isn’t my fault. She was going to kill herself one day, anyhow.”
“But you made it happen.”
“You wanted to fuck Marla, Bill wanted to watch. Marla’s dumb enough to be exploitable. Bill thinks with his dick. Everyone made it happen, man. I just filmed it.”
Gareth stood up.
“I don’t know why you don’t want to be friends, Johnny.
I’m trying my hardest.”
After he left I ordered another coffee and sat trying to figure out why I had the feeling something didn’t quite add up. In the end the closest I got was that the idea of Bill leaving such a disk where anyone could find it was ludicrous.
So much for turning off for a couple of hours.
Marla moved into Empty Mile on a Friday. She took a day off work and we ferried her things over in the pickup starting early that morning. We were finished by noon. We spent another few hours distributing her stuff around the cabin and when that was done we were all set to begin life as a newly created family.
In the early evening, too tired from moving furniture to be bothered with cooking, Marla and I decided to go into town for dinner. Stan had invited himself to eat at Rosie’s and didn’t come with us.
We went to a cheap place in Back Town and ordered steaks and a bottle of red wine. Marla talked about things we could do to the cabin and it seemed that the activity of the day, perhaps some notion of a fresh start, had lifted her spirits a little. I told her about my conversation with Gareth at the Mother Lode, how he’d admitted to making the video, but she asked me not to spoil the evening and steered the conversation back to ideas for a vegetable garden and whether or not it would be too expensive to build a deck.
We finished our food and stayed to drink the last of the wine and by the time we left the restaurant we were both relaxed and a little drunk. So when we bumped into Chris Reynolds on the street, hurrying to that night’s Elephant Society meeting, and he reminded us that we’d promised to attend, trying to talk our way out of it seemed not only rude, but also too much effort.
We signed the attendance log at the door of the hall. There were only five names before us and the lecture heading printed in red at the top of the page read,
“Might not be the most exciting of meetings, I’m afraid.”
He wandered off to sit in the first row of a block of chairs that had been set up in front of a movable whiteboard. I looked at the woman behind the desk. She smiled and shrugged apologetically.
“Randolph’s already given his talk once this year. It’s his only subject. A lot of the members tend to skip it.”
Marla and I sat in the back row. With so few people the hall seemed overly quiet and a little sad, like something that had been passed by and was now only a place for people too out of touch to know better.
Chris Reynolds stood up in front of the whiteboard and began to go through the minutes of the last meeting. I listened for a while and tried to stay interested in the state of the Society’s finances, the plans for the next outing, some sort of communication from a sister society in Australia… but the wine and the tiredness from moving Marla’s furniture began to catch up with me and in the dim hall I found my attention drifting so that periodically I had to drag myself back from some hazy other-world where I had been aimlessly turning over the trivia of daily life-groceries to buy, calculating if I had enough gas to get home…
On one of these returns I saw that Chris Reynolds had been replaced in front of the whiteboard by a grizzled old guy who was pointing to parts of a diagram thrown against the board by an overhead projector. The diagram was a topographical map of some area and appeared to show a number of rivers winding between blobs of concentric altitude lines.
I guessed the guy was Randolph Morris and that we were now in the middle of the lecture so many of the Elephant Society’s members had stayed away from. He spoke without pause in a zealot-like tone, grinding out figures on the history of seismic upheaval, erosion and the localized collapse of geological features in area after area around the world and throughout the United States. His point seemed to be that occurrences like earthquakes and landslides had in some cases been responsible for altering the course of ancient rivers and that the riverbeds they’d left behind-what he called “tertiary rivers”-could still be found through geomagnetic surveys, aerial photography, and something known as “cesium vapor analysis.” Where a river that existed nowadays cut through one of these tertiary rivers there was a good chance that it would contain rich deposits of gold. In fact, Randolph asserted, many of the larger strikes during the Gold Rush could be explained in this manner.
I’d never heard of tertiary rivers before and the idea was interesting, but Randolph spoke in such a torrent of words and repeated himself so often that after a couple of minutes I found myself again wondering about what to buy at the store.
In the end I dozed off. When Marla nudged me awake Randolph and the other Society members were already filing out of the hall and Chris Reynolds was pushing the whiteboard into a corner. The lady at the door was gone. Marla and I went over to Chris and said goodbye. He smiled a little sheepishly and shook my hand.
“You’re welcome if you ever want to come back some other night.”
Marla and I were halfway across the hall when he called after us.
“Hey, Johnny, I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but there’s another plant company making the rounds, looking for business.”
“Yeah, Plantagion. I know about them.”
“The owner came into the Nugget Shooter a couple of days ago, tried to talk me into going with them. I told him I was happy with Plantasaurus.”
