“That must have made you pretty mad. I bet after that, you couldn’t stand the sight of Ray.”
Gareth narrowed his eyes. “Careful there, Johnboy. That sounds a little bit like an accusation.”
“You know my father had a car crash just a couple of days after Pat died?”
Gareth shook his head and frowned. “Didn’t hear about that.”
“No? You know what caused it? A corroded brake line.”
“Oh, Jesus, Johnny, come on! Because I did Tripp that way?”
“And it wasn’t long after that, that he disappeared.”
“Why would I do anything to Ray? What would I get out of it? It wasn’t like the land would pass to me. Don’t go looking for skeletons where there aren’t any. We’re sitting pretty. We’ve got the land, we’re going to be rich. Just stay in line while we get the gold and a couple of years from now it’s sayonara, dude-we all go our separate ways.”
Gareth looked out through the trees at the rain-stippled river. He threw the twig he’d been playing with away and stood up.
“Might as well forget it for today, this isn’t going to let up.”
After Gareth had gone I went up to the cabin and lit a fire. Stan came out of his bedroom wearing his Captain America suit and we sat in front of the fire and listened to the rain on the roof. Stan sprawled in his chair and tipped his moths out of the pouch around his neck and watched them crawl jerkily around on the surface of his belly. They were too damaged to fly and one or two of them weren’t moving at all. He tapped them with his finger and sighed.
“Keeping the power coming across makes me tired out.”
After a while he pushed the moths back into the pouch and sat up straighter.
“I have to marry Rosie soon.”
He had a small notebook with him in which he kept a tally of the gold money he’d deposited in his bank account. He leaned forward over it now, running his thumb down the column of pencil-written figures, staring at them morosely, as though they somehow failed to convey the meaning he expected to find in them.
“You have a lot of money, Stan. You’re going to have a lot more.”
“I know.”
“More than you’d ever have made from Plantasaurus.”
“Yeah.”
Though he had worked hard at the river throughout our mining, and though his spirits had lifted enough to share in the reflex enthusiasm any person would feel at acquiring wealth, I knew that the money didn’t mean much to him. He had more in the bank than many families ever saved, but nothing else had really changed. He was still Stan, he was still the fat guy with heavy glasses who was treated in town with the overly careful attention usually reserved for children. Gold had not brought about the kind of magical transformation he had hoped for from Plantasaurus.
The only thing he had left now, the only thing of any real emotional worth, was Rosie. It seemed to me that he felt marrying her was his last chance to participate in at least some part of the mainstream world. I had previously seen such a move as fraught with potential sadness, but there wasn’t much else I could give him-Plantasaurus had failed, and the gold, of itself, was meaningless to him. So now I embraced the idea of his marriage. It was the only thing I could contribute to that might claw back some happiness for him.
For half an hour we talked about it and Stan came alive. The cold he’d had that morning was already clearing and he stood up and moved around the room, chattering about all the things he and Rosie would do together, elated now that he had my support. And because I wanted my support to be real for him, because I really did want his world to change, I took him into Oakridge that afternoon and helped him buy an engagement ring and two wedding rings from a jewelry store in Old Town.
That evening was a happy affair. Stan went over to Rosie’s with the engagement ring held tightly in his hand and when he came back he had Rosie and Millicent with him and Rosie was wearing the ring. Marla fussed over Rosie and made her hold her hand out so the diamond would flash in the light. Rosie tolerated the attention with her head bent as always and her arms limp and straight at her sides, but every now and then a small wondering smile played at the corners of her mouth and it was hard not to think that on this day, at least, she felt herself to be lucky.
Millicent drank wine with Marla and me, and later we all had dinner together. Stan and Rosie held hands under the table and we had the fire and candles, and the lights were off so that the night became a series of glowing frescoes. And I was there at last, after so many years away. I was with my brother when something important and good was happening to him. Across the plates and glasses his face was luminous with happiness and I saw that he had, if only for those fire-lit hours, reached a point where he felt as good as everyone else, where the concept of difference had ceased to exist.
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.
