Empty Mile

“Thanks. We’d really hate to lose anyone.”

“I figured. Funny thing, though, this guy-we talked for a bit, and because I hadn’t seen him around before I asked him how long he’d been in Oakridge. Turns out not long, moved here after his sister died.” Chris paused for a moment. “Guess who his sister was.”

I shrugged.

“Patricia Prentice. Bill Prentice’s wife. Funny who you meet, huh?” He gave a small wave and headed off toward the office at the back of the hall.

I asked Marla to drive us home. I sat in the passenger seat of the pickup with a rushing in my ears, as though some angry autumn storm blew privately around me. Everything suddenly made sense. The scene with Jeremy Tripp in front of our customers, the break-in at the warehouse and the destruction of our stock, the rival firm setting up in competition to us, even Marla’s enforced prostitution episode and eviction from her house.

These things hadn’t happened randomly. They weren’t unplanned. They hadn’t even happened, or at least not primarily, because Jeremy Tripp wanted to build a hotel on the warehouse land. These things had happened for an old-fashioned reason that you saw in movies and read about in books but never thought could possibly be part of your own life. These things had happened because of a desire for revenge.

Jeremy Tripp’s sister was dead, pushed to suicide by a video. And because Marla and I were the star performers he blamed us for her death. I was certain of it. Of course, that meant he had to know about the video. But being Pat’s brother meant he was also Bill’s brother-in-law, close enough for Bill to swallow whatever guilt he felt and share that piece of amateur pornography with someone who had the personality to seek retribution for what it had caused. I remembered the night I’d seen them through the window of Bill’s cabin watching something on the TV. I remembered the look of desolation on Bill’s face and the way the muscles about Jeremy Tripp’s jaw had clenched.

Jeremy Tripp believed we killed his sister and he was going to make us pay. But he wasn’t a hit man. He wasn’t a thug with a baseball bat. He was a corporate executive with a lot of money. When I first met him he’d talked about destroying someone, not physically hurting them, but destroying their entire life. And this is what he had begun to do to us. Get at Marla by kicking her out of her house. Get at both of us by hiring her as a prostitute and making me watch. Get at me again by attacking Plantasaurus, not because he cared if I suffered financially, but because he knew it would destroy Stan and by doing so hurt me worst of all.

Plantasaurus had not gone under yet. We had enough money, just, to buy replacements for the plants that had been bleached to death, but I knew we couldn’t take another hit like that without the business folding.

But there would be another hit. And another, and another after that, until Plantasaurus no longer existed. I’d seen the way Jeremy Tripp had fucked Marla, I’d seen him shoot the rabbit with his bow and arrow and leave it to scream through the night without a second thought, and I knew that he was a man who would not stop until he got the revenge he wanted. And I couldn’t let that happen to Stan. I couldn’t let something I’d done destroy his dream.

There was no point in telling Stan that Jeremy Tripp was Patricia’s brother, no need to make him even more worried about the future of Plantasaurus, so I didn’t mention the evening’s discovery to him when we got back to the cabin. But Marla and I discussed it as we lay in bed. Or rather I talked about it and she made noises in the right places-cursed when I suggested it was the reason she had lost her house, shook her head in disgust at the threat to Plantasaurus. But there was an underlying current of disinterest to her responses, as though she didn’t really want to engage. Eventually I called her on it.

“You don’t seem very worried.”

“I’m worried.”

“Come on. You’re lying there like I’m talking about football.”

“Johnny, it happened. Knowing he’s Pat’s brother doesn’t change anything.”

“It changes what’s going to happen. He’s going to keep at us until we’re completely fucked.”

Marla took a breath and said quietly, “Maybe it’s what we deserve. I do, anyhow.”

“We didn’t make the video. We don’t deserve anything. And Stan sure as shit doesn’t deserve to be punished. We have to stop Tripp doing anything else.”

Marla snorted. “He’s going to do whatever he wants.”

“Not if we take away his reason for doing it.”

“We can’t make him un-see the video, Johnny. We can’t make Pat be alive again.”

“I know that. But we can tell him we didn’t have anything to do with it.

“Good luck.”

“I have the brackets.”

“Like that’ll convince him.”

“It will if you tell him Gareth made you set the whole thing up.”

“I really don’t want to do that.”

“Why the hell not? We tell him about Gareth and Gareth becomes his target, not us.”

“Gareth’ll go psycho.”

“Gareth’s already psycho.”

“And he can tell the council about me whenever he wants. I’m not going to risk my job, Johnny. It’s the only thing of my own I have left.”

“Gareth said all that blackmail shit was over.”

Marla looked at me sadly and shook her head. “Nothing’ll ever be over with Gareth until someone kills him.”

“Well, you saw what happened to that rabbit. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

“It’s not a joke, Johnny.”

I saw in her eyes how frightened she was and for a moment I had a flash of something inside her, as though behind her face there stretched a huge dark sea of experience, an expanse of past events that I knew absolutely nothing about.

“I know it’s not a joke. But unless you’re going to go out and buy a gun this is the only hope we have of getting Jeremy Tripp off our backs. Who knows what he’s going to do next? We have to give him Gareth. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want to.”

Marla looked at me for a while without saying anything, then she turned over and pulled the covers up around her.

“Marla?”

“I’m going to sleep.”

I tried a couple more times to get her to respond, but she stayed silent and kept her back to me.

In the morning I got up early. The sun was coming in through the window and I was still tense from trying to figure out what was going on with Marla, why she wouldn’t support me about Gareth and Jeremy Tripp.

The door to Stan’s room was open and his bed was empty. I went outside and stood on the stoop and looked across the meadow. The sun had been up for a little while but the air was still cool from the night. From Rosie and Millicent’s house the almost subliminal sound of a radio threaded its way through an open window. It was tuned to a classical station and swelled or diminished as currents of air moved across the long grass.

Movement down at the bottom of the meadow caught my eye. Stan and Rosie were just disappearing into the corridor of trees that separated the land from the river. I would have left them alone to pursue whatever adventure Stan had dreamed up for them, or whatever lovemaking they might be snatching at the start of the day, but before the branches closed around them I saw that they were both carrying towels.

I stood there for several minutes wondering what this might mean. Water, a towel, Stan… In the end I stepped off the stoop and started down the meadow.

I entered the trees at the same point as Stan and Rosie and walked toward the river. As I neared it the stronger light beyond the trees made it possible to see through to the bright glitter of water. The shapes of two people moved there but they were hazed against the backlight and I could not make out what they were doing. I walked the last few yards softly and stopped, hidden by a bush where the riverbank began.

Stan and Rosie stood holding hands on a large flat rock that jutted out into the slow-moving water. They were both naked and in the morning light their bodies were luminous against the dark green of the leaves on the far bank. His, smooth and full and rounded, standing on solidly planted feet. Hers, very thin, back curving so that her