Empty Mile (16 page)

“You know, this site would be perfect for a small hotel. Say about thirty rooms. You ever thought of that?”

He made a tight U-turn and drove leisurely down to the road and away. Stan dropped to his knees and started inspecting the plants, pulling their limp carcasses from the soil and holding them up to the light. The women looked briefly at each other then got into their Mercedes. Cloris thanked us then quickly made her own U-turn and drove away before I could say anything.

“They’re not going to be customers, are they, Johnny?”

“Somehow, I don’t think so.”

“This is bad. They might tell someone else.”

“What do you think happened?”

Stan shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s too quick to be a disease. The only thing it looks like is too much insect spray.” I prodded a couple of the plants with the toe of my shoe but it was pointless, I didn’t know anything about the things plants died of. Some of the planters had fallen onto their sides and I bent down to right them, pushing the spilled soil back into them with the flat of my hand. As I did so I smelled something—an ammoniac, chemical tang. I lifted a handful of soil to my nose, then held it out for Stan to sniff.

“Smells like bleach, Johnny.”

“Yeah.”

I dug a sample from another of the planters. Same thing. The plants had been fed bleach.

Stan frowned. “Why would he kill his own plants?”

“Maybe someone spilled something when they were cleaning.”

“Rosie’s his cleaner. She’d never do anything like that, she’s careful.”

Stan was right of course. No one had accidentally done anything to these plants.

At the kitchen table that evening Stan seemed drained and serious. He ate quietly without any of his usual wise-cracking or horsing around. The matchbox in which he kept his moths lay next to his plate and occasionally he pushed it open and looked for a few moments at the insects inside. When he had finished eating he drank a glass of milk.

“Johnny, do you think Plantasaurus is going to work out?”

“Other than today I think it’s looking pretty good, don’t you?”

“It’s important now, Johnny. Really important.” He was silent for a moment, then he added, “Because of Rosie. I’ve got to make sure she doesn’t stop liking me.”

Later, when he was in bed and I was saying goodnight to him, he reached across to the nightstand for his matchbox. He was wearing his pajamas but he had his Captain America mask on. He pushed the box open slightly and breathed deeply from the opening and then said seriously, “When things get hard you need more power. If you don’t have enough everything starts to go wrong, like today. Maybe you should get a costume. You can have Superman if you want.”

“I’m not wearing a costume, Stan.”

“But we’ll get more power.”

“Listen to me, dude, this power thing is getting a bit tired.”

“That’s because you don’t believe in anything. You’re so upset all the time about things that have already happened you don’t think there’s anything good left in the world.”

“That’s not true.”

“The world’s a good place, Johnny, it is. Only sometimes you have to get extra power to help it along.”

I could see the subject was important to him so I didn’t push things any further. “Okay, but you’ll have to do it for both of us, ’cause I still ain’t wearing no costume.”

He smiled softly. “Okay, Johnny.”

After I left Stan I called Marla to see if she wanted to come over and spend the night, but it was late by then and she told me she couldn’t face the drive.

“I wouldn’t be much company anyway, Johnny. I feel like a pig.”

“You’re not a pig.”

“I’m disgusting.”

“Don’t talk like that. You’re a good person.”

On the other end of the line Marla’s laughter sounded lost and a long way off. “Really?”

I thought about telling her of Gareth’s promise not to pimp her anymore but the way she sounded right then I didn’t think it would have much of an impact. Instead, I made a date to go to her place for lunch the next day. Then I told her I loved her and hung up.

CHAPTER 17

T
he next day was Saturday. I took Stan out to Empty Mile so he could spend it with Rosie, then I headed to the Channon.

Marla’s road was quiet, as usual. I had the windows down and in the shade of the trees the air was cool. Ordinarily it would have been a pleasant scene, but it was marred for me that morning by the sight of a red Jaguar parked on the shoulder of the road opposite her driveway. Its top was down and as I turned into Marla’s place, Jeremy Tripp waved at me from the driver’s seat and smiled like we were old friends.

Marla opened her door as soon as I knocked and jerked me inside. “Did you see him?”

“Yeah, what’s that about?”

“What’s he doing?”

“Looks like he’s watching the house.”

“He’s been there for half an hour.”

We went through to the kitchen at the back of the house.

“Why would he come here?”

“I don’t think it’s too hard to guess, Johnny. He must have gotten my address from Gareth.”

Marla looked pale and frightened and the skin under her eyes was dark. I put my hands on her shoulders.

“I don’t think Gareth has anything to do with this.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“No, I mean it. I went to see him yesterday, about this pimping bullshit. He told me he was going to leave you alone, now that he knows we’re together. He even apologized.”

“Doesn’t sound like Gareth.”

“I think he meant it. You’re in the book, Tripp could have gotten your last name when he spoke to Gareth and found out where you live himself.”

“So, what, he thinks now he can come around and fuck me whenever he wants? Jesus Christ!”

We made coffee and stood around expecting Tripp to knock on the door at any moment. As Marla raised her cup I noticed a long thin burn on the inside of her forearm.

“What happened?”

She shrugged and didn’t say anything. I took hold of her arm and looked more closely at the burn. The blister was about four inches long and the skin that bordered it was singed a pale brown and looked dry and dead.

“What the fuck happened?”

She pulled her arm away. “I told you last night, I’m a pig. And people who act like pigs should be punished.”

“You did that to yourself? Christ! How?”

“I heated up a knife on the stove.”

“Marla, this is terrible.”

“No, it’s not. It’s exactly right.”

I was about to say more, but the bubble of toxic emotion that had formed around us was punctured then by a loud knocking on the front door. Marla looked stricken and groaned.

“I can’t do it again. I can’t …” She trudged along the hall to the front of the house and tiredly pulled the door open.

On the porch, Jeremy Tripp stood beside a smaller man who wore a smooth dark suit and held a large manila envelope. Beyond them, in the driveway, a new-looking silver sedan sat under a pattern of leaf shadow. Jeremy Tripp lit his face up with a high-voltage expression.

“Time to fuck off and find somewhere else to live.”

The man with Jeremy Tripp cleared his throat. He reached into his jacket pocket and held out a business card. “Gerald Turnbull. I act as Mr. Tripp’s lawyer in this matter.”

Marla frowned. “What matter?”

“Slight change of landlord,” Jeremy Tripp hissed.

The lawyer cleared his throat again. He opened the envelope he was carrying and drew out several pieces of paper which had been stapled together. He held the papers out to us and turned the sheets one by one so that we could see their contents. They looked like they formed some sort of contract.

Marla shrugged. “So?”

“So, today Mr. Tripp closed the sale of this property.”

“What?”

“He owns this house now. Your previous landlord, Mr. Constantian, sold it to him.”

“Bullshit.” Marla snatched the papers from him and looked through them closely. A few moments later her arm dropped and the lawyer took his papers back. “He never said anything to me about selling.”

“The sale was conducted somewhat more rapidly than usual.”

Jeremy Tripp turned the palms of both hands up and grinned. “One of the happy consequences of having a lot of money.”

“You are fucking kidding. You’re my landlord?”

“Not for long.”

The lawyer reached into his envelope again and took out another sheet of typewritten paper. “You rent this house on a month-by-month basis. You don’t have a lease. Mr. Tripp would like you to quit the property as soon as possible, and in any case not later than six weeks.”

He held out the sheet. Marla took it and looked at it so blankly the lawyer frowned.

“That means six weeks from today. Do you understand?”

Marla shook her head. “This is my house. I’ve lived here ten years.” She turned to Jeremy Tripp. “Why are you doing this? You don’t need this place. I can’t leave here.”

“Oh, I think you can probably do anything you put your mind to.” He looked up at the sky and the trees around him and took a deep breath. “What a day.”

He turned and walked down the porch steps. At the bottom he looked back at me.

“You know what? If you and your dumb-ass brother had a bit of competition you might raise your game. Might be good for you. What do you think?”

Then he turned and headed back along the drive and out to the road. The lawyer checked inside his envelope to see if he’d missed anything then nodded goodbye and went down and got into the silver sedan. Marla slammed the front door so hard the glass rattled.

We lay on her bed and I held her as the light outside the windows softened into late afternoon. I knew what this eviction meant to her. She had no family of her own, no hometown to go back to for Christmases and birthdays, no childhood repository of happy memories. This house had become all of these things for her and losing it would rob her of the largest piece of the life she had managed to create for herself.

She threw her head back and sighed. “I thought I’d end up buying this house. It’s the one thing, the
one thing
I’ve managed to hang on to.”

“You don’t know this Tripp guy outside of the other night, right?”

“I never saw him before in my life.”

“Then this is getting weird.”

I told Marla about his visit to the warehouse, how he’d poisoned the plants and driven our customers away. “He was obviously trying to hurt our business. Now, for some reason, he wants to hurt you too. I don’t understand what’s going on.”

“Maybe it’s a man thing, like he has to destroy the whore he slept with.”

“But buying a house to do it?”

“Yeah, I’d have to be a monumentally bad lay.” Marla tried to smile at her own joke but just ended up looking sadder.

I stayed at her place as long as I could before I had to pick up Stan. When I left I asked her to come with me but by then she was so thoroughly depressed she’d curled into a ball on the bed and wouldn’t move.

In the pickup, on the way back from Rosie’s house, Stan had a smirk on his face and kept giving me sideways looks.

“Okay. What is it?”

He turned toward me and smiled painfully. “I did it.”

“Did what?”

“With Rosie. We had sex.”

I’d known it would happen at some point, but now that it had I didn’t really know how to react.

“Wow … That’s pretty big.”

Stan must have mistaken my hesitancy for disapproval because he spoke quickly. “It’s all right, she can’t have babies.”

“I know. Her grandmother told me. It’s okay, dude. I don’t think it’s wrong or anything, I’m just, you know, taking it in.”

“It was my first time.”

“I figured. How do you feel about it?”

“I feel good. I mean, gosh, Johnny, it makes your head spin round. It’s good to be that close to someone.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah …” Stan nodded softly to himself as though he was turning over the experience, running the truth of it between his fingers. “Yeah … it makes you feel different.”

CHAPTER 18

M
onday was pretty much what most of our working days had become. A few hours servicing existing Plantasaurus customers and installing displays for new ones, the rest of the time back at the warehouse looking after our plants and doing whatever office work the business required. Including private houses, we had about fifty clients now. That was really only enough work to fill three and a half days a week but I spread it over five to create the illusion for Stan that Plantasaurus was a regular, full-time concern.

He was thriving in his new role of “businessman,” but he dealt with only one side of the operation—the making up of plant displays and the maintenance visits. What he wasn’t involved in was the constant juggling of finances, the balancing of outgoings and income, paying invoices for plants and soil and containers, issues of tax and insurance. He knew about these things because I talked to him about them, but that kind of information was too complex for him to hold in his head long enough for it to become real.

In a way this was a blessing because it prevented him from seeing the real direction the business was taking. I’d done some calculating and though we were just about covering costs now, we were still a long way from the total number of customers we needed for the business to be financially stable. This probably wasn’t unusual for a new company but the rate at which we were acquiring new clients was beginning to fall. If our rate of growth slowed further, or some catastrophe struck and we actually began to lose clients, long-term survival would not be possible—we couldn’t go on indefinitely running an enterprise that didn’t pay us a wage.

It was late afternoon when Bill Prentice pulled up outside the warehouse. The day was warm and we had the doors open a little for air. When Stan saw the car he jumped up from the planter he’d been working on and called out happily, “Hey, Johnny, it’s Bill.”

He went to the doors and yanked them apart. Bill stood in the opening, staring into the warehouse.

Stan gave him a mock salute and said, “Hiya, Bill, long time no see.”

For a moment Bill didn’t register him, his eyes were locked deeper inside the building, on me. I hadn’t told Stan about the confrontation Marla and I had had with him outside the Black Cat café and Stan frowned as he followed Bill’s gaze, trying to figure out what was going on. He turned back to Bill and waved a hand in front of his eyes.

“Hey, Earth to Bill.”

Bill Prentice looked at Stan then and nodded tiredly. “Hello, Stan.”

If Stan had been a puppy he would have bounced. He grabbed Bill’s sleeve and pulled him over the threshold. “Look at the place, Bill. Check out all the plants we’ve got.”

Bill pulled his arm away and looked grimly around the warehouse. I could see Stan was hurt but he tried to hide it and ran over to where we’d stacked the empty planters and the sacks of potting mix.

“See how we have it organized? All neat. I told you I could do it.”

Bill closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose as though he was fighting off a headache. “Yes, Stan. I see what you’ve done.”

The overhead lighting in the warehouse brought out the hollows of his cheeks and the bags around his eyes. He’d lost weight and the linen jacket he wore was loose on him, but there was more to the way he looked than just the loss of a few pounds. He seemed somehow to have fallen in on himself, as though some dreadful cancer or parasite was eating him from the inside out.

Stan cleared his throat and grinned nervously.

“Seen any more bears, Bill?”

But Bill was not there to reminisce. He pulled two sheets of folded paper from inside his jacket and held them out to me.

“I want you to leave. This will cancel the lease agreement. You can just go, you won’t be liable for anything. You’ll get back all the rent you’ve paid.”

“What!” Stan screwed his eyes up and shook his head rapidly from side to side. “What? This is our place! You said it was. You said—You said—Johnny, what is he saying?”

I took the papers and skimmed them. Two copies of the same document, confirming that we agreed to cancel our lease on the warehouse. Bill had already signed in the space next to his name. While I was reading he turned to Stan and his face softened a little.

“I’m sorry, Stan, but I need the warehouse back.”

“You said we could use it.”

“That was before Pat died.”

“But we need it. I’m a businessman now!”

Bill took a breath and let it out. “Stan, things go on in this world that are complicated, things you can’t understand.”

Stan looked as though he’d been slapped. Bill saw it, started to speak again, then fell silent.

Stan put his hands on his head and looked at me. He was lost. He’d thought of Bill as his friend and now this friend wanted to wipe out his business. I handed back the papers.

“You want to sell the property, right? Someone made you an offer but they don’t want tenants.”

“I want you out. That’s all.”

“We have this place for a year with right of renewal for two more if we want it. We’re not leaving.”

Stan stepped quickly to my side and held on to the sleeve of my shirt. He pointed toward the doorway and shouted, “This is our business! This is Plantasaurus! You better go.”

Bill looked surprised at the outburst. For a moment he did nothing but blink, then his face flushed and his lips compressed. I didn’t understand what was happening at first, it was so beyond anything I might have expected, but as we stood there it became apparent he was struggling not to cry.

It only lasted a moment, then it was over and his face was still again. His eyes, though, glistened under the light. When he spoke it was to Stan.

“I just want to finish things. I want an end to it, that’s all. It’s not about you.”

He turned and walked out to his car and drove away. Stan sat down on a sack of potting mix, put his hands on his knees, and started rocking back and forth.

“My head feels like it’s going to burst open. Do you think that can happen, Johnny? Are there things that can make your head explode?”

“No, but I know what you mean.”

“But your brain’s strong, you can hold things in. My brain’s not like that. What if one day something happens and I just can’t stop it?”

“Stan, your head’s not going to explode.”

“I wish Bill hadn’t come around. Why is he so upset?”

“It’s a huge shock losing your wife. Sometimes people flip out.”

Stan took a matchbox out of his jeans pocket and pushed it half open. The moths inside moved sluggishly about. He breathed warm air on them then lifted the box and pressed the open part of it against his forehead. He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again he looked vaguely dissatisfied.

We finished up at the warehouse and went home. Stan was worn out from the scene with Bill and soon after dinner he went upstairs to his room. I sat in the kitchen and wondered if rather than declining customer numbers, it was going to be me who destroyed Plantasaurus. Unless Bill actually did have some sound business reason for wanting us out of the warehouse, the explanation for his visit that afternoon had to be his strange hatred of me. And if that was so, it wasn’t a situation I could allow to continue. Plantasaurus was too important to Stan for me to be the cause of any threat to it.

I brooded on the problem until the sky outside started to darken. Stan had told me that when Bill closed down the garden center after his wife’s death he had also moved out of the house he’d shared with her and relocated to a cabin in the mountains. At around 8:30 I went upstairs to Stan’s room and asked him if he knew where the cabin was. Fortunately, the garden center staff had had a team lunch there at the beginning of summer and Stan was able to give me directions. I told him I’d be back in a hour or two and headed off in the pickup to find out what, exactly, Bill’s problem with me was.

The cabin was in the hills northeast of Oakridge. The country there was higher and craggier than that closer to the Oakridge basin and in daytime the views could be spectacular. A single thin lane of blacktop climbed through this area. Occasional trails twisted off it to small weekend homes built by those for whom the scenery nearer town was not quite overwhelming enough.

It was night now, but the sky was clear and a three-quarter moon made driving easy enough. The start of the trail that led to Bill’s cabin was marked by a boulder that had been painted white. From there, Stan had said, it was a couple of hundred yards. Bill’s cabin was the only one on the trail.

I made the turn and parked just past the white rock and killed the engine. I didn’t want Bill to hear me coming and do anything which might prevent my planned visit—lock his door against me, pretend he wasn’t home, arm himself with a weapon …

I walked quietly along the trail practicing my opening speech. It was going to be difficult enough to get a foot in the door and I wanted to make the most of those first few seconds—
Listen, Bill, we need to sit down and talk things over man to man …

When I reached the cabin, though, it was immediately apparent I wasn’t going to get a chance to talk to him man to man or any other way. Parked carelessly in front of Bill’s SUV at the side of the cabin, Jeremy Tripp’s E-type Jaguar glimmered grayly in the moonlight. I could hear it’s engine ticking as it cooled.

Jeremy Tripp and Bill Prentice.
Click, click, click
. A series of incidents from the recent past stepped brightly forward from the dark background of memory. Things which, at the time, had seemed uncertain or inexplicable now gathered meaning to themselves. The way Jeremy Tripp had looked at the garden center on his first visit to it, as though measuring it against some plan in his head. His crack about how the place would make a good site for a hotel. His bleached plants, dumped so publicly. And Bill’s weak attempt to move us out.

Bill Prentice and Jeremy Tripp. What could it equal but one man wanting to sell and the other wanting to buy. And the buyer not wanting the inconvenience of tenants. That had to be what Jeremy Tripp’s dead plants were about—a first step toward wrecking our ability to afford the business and, by so doing, remove our need for the warehouse. Bill’s visit, with his absurdly unenforceable demand that we give up our tenancy, must have been the push from his side.

And at the end of this freight train of conclusions there followed one other, the possibility that even Jeremy Tripp’s attacks on Marla—evicting her from her house, buying her as a prostitute—might be part of this same offensive. Was she perhaps just another way to strike at me, part of a war of attrition designed to force me to terminate Plantasaurus?

The threat that Stan and I might lose our business seemed suddenly very real. Our lease couldn’t legally be terminated unless we failed to pay rent, but if two rich men wanted us out things could get very difficult indeed for our already fragile enterprise. And, the terrible thought occurred to me, they might not even have to get us out for Plantasaurus to suffer. If Tripp bought the place with us as sitting tenants, having a man who fucked Marla on his deck and shot rabbits with a longbow as our landlord would make running our business a living nightmare. What series of obstructions might he not place in our path?

Though speaking with Bill was out of the question, I couldn’t leave without at least trying to learn
something
that might help me against these two men.

The cabin didn’t reflect Bill’s wealth. It was similar to many scattered throughout the mountains—made of logs with a stone chimney at one end, one or two bedrooms and a living area, a rainwater tank, electricity from a generator twenty yards back in the woods. The front windows were heavily curtained but on the side of the cabin where Bill’s SUV was parked there was another window. It was small and uncovered and set at about shoulder height. I squeezed into the space between the cabin and the car and moved carefully along the wall until I reached the edge of the window. I crouched down, then slowly raised myself until I was able to see through the bottom corner of the glass.

My line of sight was at an angle to the interior of the room but I could see enough. I was looking into the living area of the cabin. The room was spartan, the walls undecorated and the floor without covering. There was a wooden kitchen table and some chairs and, in front of them, a couch and a coffee table. Bill Prentice and Jeremy Tripp sat at opposite ends of the couch and it was plain they were not whiling away the minutes in idle conversation.

A large sheet of paper was spread across the coffee table. It was a mottled white and had thin lines and rectangular shapes on it. I couldn’t see it clearly, but it looked like a set of architectural plans. If the two men had been examining it earlier, though, they weren’t now. Tripp had just said something and was waiting for a response, his face stony with anger. Bill was staring at the floor, immobile. After a moment, Tripp spoke again and when Bill still didn’t respond he made an abrupt, irritated movement and snatched a remote from the coffee table. He pointed it into a corner of the room I couldn’t see and a thin wash of light spread back over the bare floorboards. Tripp’s jaw muscles bunched as he watched whatever had just appeared on the screen. Bill slumped forward and covered his face with his hands.

I stayed there for several seconds but the scene didn’t change and soon the fear of getting caught forced me away from the window and back along the trail to my truck.