staring at the meadow or walking the few yards to Stan’s trailer to check on him. At these times I would find him either staring blankly at some children’s show on his TV or half asleep in bed. If I tried to rouse him he would look sleepily at me and ask if I was all right before turning over and closing his eyes again. I began to think that I would have to get him psychiatric help. How I could do this, though, without the whole Jeremy Tripp issue coming to light, I had no idea. I was in a state of despair. I knew how badly Stan must feel. Anyone would bow under the weight of knowing they were responsible for driving a loved one to kill another human being. But Stan, who had so little experience with these dreadful adult emotions, who had so little ability to intellectualize justifications for action, would be crushed.
That he was in pain was terrible enough, but it was made infinitely worse for me by knowing that if I had not provoked Gareth, if I had not lost my head, Stan would still be basking in the honeymoon glow of his marriage. But I
When Gareth returned to Empty Mile, early one morning, he didn’t bang on the door and push his way in for breakfast as he had done in the past, but yelled from outside that he was going to start sluicing again and headed off across the meadow without waiting for an answer.
Stan had begun to reemerge by this time and would sit in the afternoons outside his trailer, wrapped against the cooling weather, or walk with Rosie through the long grass, talking quietly and holding hands. Neither he nor I had been down to the river since Stan learned about Jeremy Tripp, and there was now such a distance between him and the workings of the world around him that I knew his time digging gold out of the ground was over.
And for my part, there was no way I could ever work alongside Gareth again. We had reached a point where the dreadful partnership could not continue.
Toward the end of the morning I put on a heavy coat and went down to the river. I found Gareth working one of the sluices, his face set and angry.
“Johnny. Glad you could finally get off your ass.”
“I’m not here to work.”
Gareth leaned on his shovel. “What?”
“I want to move on. I don’t care about the gold anymore. I want to sell the land to a mining company. You can have half of what we get for it.”
“No fucking way. We are not selling. Those guys’ll pay us a fraction of what it’s worth, you know that. They’ll see us coming and fuck us in the ass without even thinking about it. No, we’re going to keep on mining just like we’ve been doing. And you’re going to behave yourself, and Marla’s going to come out of the fucking cabin and say hello to me once in a while. In fact, Johnny, while we’re on the subject, there’s a whole lot more Marla could be doing.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Given our history, how we all started off together and how we’re all together again-”
“We’re not ‘all together again.’”
“-how we’re all together again, I think we should share Marla. I have a share in the land, dude. I should have a share in the woman.”
“Are you fucking insane?”
“Gosh, I hope you haven’t forgotten that piece of pipe.”
“Gareth, we are not sharing Marla. You’re not getting anywhere near her.”
“Well, you’re angry now, you’re not thinking clearly. But I’m telling you, Johnboy, tomorrow I’m coming a courtin’.” Gareth smirked at me and lifted a shovel of dirt and began sifting it into the sluice.
On my way back to the cabin I collected Stan and Rosie from their trailer. If it had been anything else I would have tried to keep Stan out of it. There was no need, after all, to load him with worries that he could do nothing about. But I knew we could not give in to Gareth and opposing him would have serious consequences for all of us. It seemed only fair, then, that Stan should be included if his future was at stake as well.
Marla, Stan, and Rosie sat across from me in the living room. Marla and Stan looked worried. Rosie stared at her lap.
I told them what Gareth wanted and explained that his leverage to make it happen was the threat of having me arrested for the death of Jeremy Tripp. Stan looked ashen and began squeezing his knees with his hands, trying not to cry. It occurred to me then, too late of course, that he would now feel not only responsible for making me kill Jeremy Tripp, but also for the fact that Gareth might send me to jail for it.
“Don’t worry, Stan, we’re not giving in this time. We have to stand up to him or this will go on forever.”
Stan spoke in a kind of croaking whisper: “But Johnny, I don’t want you to go to jail.”
“I’m not going to jail. I don’t think Gareth will really tell the police.”
Marla snorted incredulously. “What makes you think that?”
“He’ll have to explain how he got the pipe and that’ll make him almost as guilty as me.”
“He’ll send it in anonymously, you idiot.”
“Then I’ll tell the police about him, same thing. And anyway, I think there’s more to it. I think in a weird way he doesn’t want to be without me, without you. He needs his toys to play with.”
“What if you’re wrong?”
“I don’t know, but we have to at least try to get out from under him. If we don’t, this kind of shit is going to keep on happening.”
Marla made a gun with her thumb and forefinger and fired it at the side of her head. “My way would be better, Johnny.”
Even though, if my planned opposition to Gareth failed and we were forced to capitulate, Marla would be the one suffering most at his hands, I was more worried right then about Stan. I felt powerless to do anything for him, to get past his unhappiness and help him in some way. Out of desperation, I asked him to camp out with me that night. We had often gone camping as kids and I was hoping that memories of those times and the closeness of just the two of us together outdoors would help him shed a little of his guilt.
It was no great expedition, just a tent and some food and a hike in the afternoon, up to the top of the spur that bordered the meadow-the same hike we’d made when I’d checked my father’s aerial photograph against the landscape.
We pitched our tent twenty yards back from the collapsed end of the spur. There was still an hour of daylight left when we were done and we prepared a fire for later then sat wearing sweaters and coats, gazing at the view. The hills ran off to the distance in broken ranks, their upper slopes copper-gold in the lowering sun, the valleys between them in shadow, filling with mist as the air cooled.
It got cold enough for us to start our fire pretty soon, and while there was a little light left in the air we made a dinner of sausages, beans, and bread rolls. Stan became quiet as evening fell and when we were finished eating we sat close to the fire and there were long periods of silence between us. I was hoping he would open up, that the hard shell of his depression might crack a little. But between our sparse bursts of small talk he stared into the fire and said nothing.
We had a gas light set a couple of yards out from the fire and moths were battering themselves against its bright frosted glass. I went over and caught a few and gave them to him in the plastic bag our bread rolls had come in.
“If you don’t have any moths, how are you going to bring the power across?”
Stan took the bag from me and held it up to the fire. For a moment he watched the moths crawl around, then he handed the bag back to me.
“I don’t want them. I don’t want to bring any more power across.”
“Why not?”
“Everything’s too wrong.”
“Won’t the power fix it?”
Stan breathed in and out and shook his head.
“Look, Stan, you lit a fire when you were angry. And you did it because Jeremy Tripp did something bad to Rosie. That’s all. Everything else has nothing to do with you.”
“You’re going to go to jail.”
“I’m not going to jail, I told you. Nothing bad is going to happen.”
Stan turned away from me and stared into the fire. “It is, Johnny.”
