Empty Mile (6 page)

“If it hadn’t been for you guys, I would have been for sure.”

The three of us headed back along the trail, sharing a kind of survivor camaraderie, rehashing the event and commenting how lucky we all were to have escaped unhurt.

At one point Bill clapped us both on the back. “Well, I guess you know what answer I’m going to give you on the warehouse.”

Stan yelped. “Really, Bill, do you mean it? Really?”

“How could I say no to a fellow bear fighter?”

Stan looked suddenly serious. “I won’t be able to work at the garden center anymore once our business gets going.”

“You just stay on as long as it’s convenient.”

Stan was anxious to tell my father about his adventure and ran on ahead. After he’d gone Bill said he’d have some lease papers for the warehouse drawn up and that he’d give us a discount on the market rate.

“And the, er, thing with Nicola, that girl, we can be discreet?”

“It’s none of my business what you do. I’ll tell Stan not to say anything.”

“Good, good … We understand each other. It’s crazy, I know. I love my wife very much, but sex … I’m not like other men and for me, when it rears its head it’s like going mad, something I just can’t control.”

Bill looked like he was set to continue sharing, but just then three of the men from the picnic met us on the trail. They were carrying an assortment of makeshift weapons and when they saw us they looked visibly relieved. Nicola had raised the alarm and the Elephant Society members who hadn’t yet gone home had sent their finest. Bill was in his element answering questions and describing how close to death we had all come.

When we got back to the picnic ground he got to do it all over again. Among the people who gathered around to ooh and ah at the drama I noticed a tall man and a blond woman with their arms around Nicola’s shoulders. They watched Bill with a little more scrutiny than the others and I couldn’t help imagining that a small part of them was puzzling over the exact nature of their daughter’s excursion into the woods.

My father was not among Bill’s audience. He had fallen asleep beneath the pages of his paperback and since he was on the far side of the picnic ground Nicola’s panicked cries had not disturbed him. Stan woke him and told him about the bear, all energized and proud of himself, wanting to impress him with this feat that surpassed what might have been expected of even a normal person. He was surprised, I think, when my father drew him close and held him tightly for a long time without saying a word.

Later, as we were heading back to the car, my father told me I was never to take Stan into the woods again.

CHAPTER 7

A
round eight o’clock in the evening several days after the Elephant Society picnic, Gareth called me on my cell and asked if I could do him a favor. A job for one of his hookers had come in but he had a date and needed someone else to drive her. I wasn’t desperate for the fifty dollars he offered, but I wanted an excuse to get out of the house, to do something that didn’t involve Stan or my father. So I said I’d do it. If nothing else it was a distraction from worrying about whether or not Marla was ever going to call.

The drive up to the lake in the dark was brutal and I was glad when I pulled into the parking area and saw the lighted windows of Gareth’s bungalow. I went into the office and found him sitting behind the desk, wearing a dark suit and drinking a can of beer.

“Thanks for helping out, dude. I do
not
want to blow it with this woman.” He handed me a business card. “Her address. When you’re finished tonight come over, I want you to meet her.”

I read the card. It had her name,
Vivian Gelhardt
, her address, and, at the bottom, the title
Environmental Friend.

“Environmental Friend?”

Gareth rolled his eyes. “No one’s perfect. She’ll tell you all about it if you ask her.”

“I’ll see how I’m feeling.”

“Sure. Here’s the place for the girl.”

He handed me a scrap of paper with the scrawled address for a house on the Slopes.

“Just drive her up there, make sure she gets inside okay, wait in the car till she’s finished, then drive her back here again. Shouldn’t be more than an hour. Here’s your dough.” As he passed me the money he held my eyes and said, “We’re going to be good friends again, Johnny. You’ll see. I bet in a while we’ll be spending a whole lot more time together.”

We went outside and Gareth pointed down the line of cabins.

“She’s in the last one. I’ll see you at Vivian’s.”

He walked off toward his Jeep.

The girl was waiting when I knocked on her door. We said hello but not much else. She spent most of the trip puckering her lips at herself in the rearview mirror.

The Slopes sat high above town on the north face of the Oakridge basin. Between them and the residential areas behind Back Town there was a wide, steeply climbing belt of Bureau of Land Management forest through which a long, narrow road cut its way, connecting Oakridge’s richest residents with the common folk below. Once we’d passed through town and entered the forest the dark wrapped itself around us like a blanket and there was nothing to see from the road except a solid black wall of trees and the occasional entrance to a fire trail.

The house I took the girl to was built to look like it had been made out of mud bricks. It had a five-car garage and a garden that was separated from the street by an adobe wall. The plants in the grounds were lit here and there by gentle baby-spots. I watched as the girl was buzzed through the gate and made sure she got up the driveway and into the house. Then I just sat and waited and an hour later she came out again and I took her back to Tunney Lake.

I didn’t really have any great desire to spend time with Gareth, but I didn’t feel like going home either. Plus I was vaguely interested in seeing what type of woman could bear to be with him. So I checked Vivian’s address on her card and made my way across Oakridge and back up to the Slopes again.

The house was on the first cross street at the top of the road through the forest. It was a two-story log cabin the size of a large suburban house, made from pale wood that had been stripped of bark and varnished. Over the front door there was a semicircular panel of stained glass that threw a fan of blotchy colored light onto the fieldstone path leading across the lawn from the street.

Gareth answered the door when I knocked. He had a drink in his hand and looked relaxed and at home in surroundings that were very much more salubrious than those of his own home. He led me through an open foyer of bare wood and hanging Indian blankets that gave directly onto a large open living area. The décor here was Rustic Frontier—rough-woven rugs on the floor, two long couches in earthy, natural fabric facing each other over a chunky coffee table.

Gareth raised his eyebrows and whispered, “Not bad, huh?

I’ll tell you a secret, Johnny. I’m in love with this woman.”

I looked at him, thinking he had to be joking, but his expression was perfectly serious. A woman with a glass of white wine in her hand entered from a door at the far end of the room. She folded herself onto one of the couches.

“Vivian, this is my friend Johnny.”

We said hi and Gareth got me a drink and then sat next to Vivian. I sat across from them on the other couch.

Vivian was about ten years older than Gareth. She had sharp features and dark blonde hair. Her gaze was direct and her voice had the harsh edges of a German accent. She spoke before I was properly settled in my seat.

“Gareth tells me you stole his girlfriend.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“But things hurt just the same, no?”

“I suppose so.”

“Something always remains, some piece of emotional grit that you can never quite get rid of, I think.”

Gareth gave an embarrassed laugh. “Viv, give him a break.”

She took his hand and kissed it. “If you wish, my broken one.”

If Gareth really was in love with this woman then it looked to me like it was a one-sided relationship. She seemed fond of him, but it was pretty obvious she knew he wasn’t what she needed.

In an effort to prevent the conversation from revisiting my part in Gareth’s past I asked her about herself. “What’s an Environmental Friend? Some sort of Greenpeace organization?”

Vivian changed gears abruptly. Her eyes lit up like she had a fever and I realized I was almost certainly going to regret the question.

“An organization? Bah! I am not one for organizations. It is a state of mind. An approach to life. It is one of the things I am.”

“Cool.”

“Yes, it is very cool. After university I left Germany. I vowed I would never go back and I have kept that vow. You cannot imagine the claustrophobia of Europe, the catastrophic rate at which the so-called cultured countries are covering themselves with concrete.”

“I lived in London for a long time.”

“Ach, what a pigsty. You know what I mean, then. I met my ex-husband in San Francisco and we lived there for a long time. You cannot live in that city without becoming passionate about the environment. No European can, at least. The harbor, the fog, the hills, the coast. So much beauty, so big and so wild. But what did I see? The same destruction I had witnessed in Europe. So I made a commitment to myself that I would not accept it like everyone else. And that is why I call myself an Environmental Friend. Because I am not blind to environmental concerns.”

“Do you work in the community, that sort of thing?”

“I have done.” She waved dismissively. “But that was in another life. After I divorced my husband I moved here, and in Oakridge there is less to fight against. I struggle now in smaller ways, in the philosophy of what I consume, in the letters I write to the town council.”

“You don’t like the council?”

“They are not wholly bad, they can be persuaded in certain things—the glass recycling bins you see around town are my doing. But they are like every other commercial entity. They believe that to survive you must keep getting bigger, that you must expand and expand. It does not dawn on them to put their energies into devising a sustainable status quo.”

Gareth, who had grown a little uncomfortable during Vivian’s speech, stretched and asked no one in particular what time it was.

Vivian looked at him with disapproval. “Gareth, I think, does not see the world in terms of its beauty. For instance, he would support the council if they were to build a road to his cabins.”

“Of course. Jesus …”

“Money, ach! That lake is a jewel. It should be protected. First a road, then a thousand people a day, then hot dog stands and the damn Coca-Cola logo. Let’s have a Starbucks too! No, a road would ruin it.”

She stood up abruptly and held her hand out to Gareth.

“It’s time you took me to bed. I’m tired of talking about myself. Goodnight, Johnny. Please lock up on your way out.”

Gareth winked at me. “I’ll call you, dude. Thanks for tonight.”

After Vivian and Gareth had gone upstairs I sat for a moment feeling the big room around me, listening to the silence and to the short bursts of laughter that came muffled by wood from Vivian’s bedroom. Then I got up and went out to my pickup.

It was cold outside now and on the drive home I felt empty and alone. It seemed everyone tonight had the solace of a warm body next to them, even if it was mercenary, like Gareth’s hooker and her john, or as mismatched as the pairing of Gareth and Vivian. I fiddled with the controls of the heater, but it wouldn’t work, so I zipped up my jacket and drove faster than I should have to get home.

CHAPTER 8

I
saw Marla the following Saturday. It was a hot day and she’d called and suggested going to the lake for a swim. Tunney Lake was not the first place I would have picked to continue our reunion but I was so relieved she’d finally called I would have said yes to anything.

When I picked her up she was wearing a tight white T-shirt and denim cutoffs and as she slid into the passenger seat I was suddenly aware of how dreadfully alone I would be if I failed at working her back into my life.

She seemed preoccupied during the drive and spent most of it staring through the side window and picking at the frayed hem of her shorts. It wasn’t the best of signs for reestablishing a relationship but when we got to the lake and parked and were walking away from the pickup she put her hand in mine and squeezed it.

We went down to the southern end of the beach where there were fewer kids running around, stripped down to swimsuits, and stretched out. I could feel the heat of the coarse sand through the cotton of my towel. I rolled onto my side and looked at Marla. She was wearing a plain red bikini and I noticed that she had put on a little weight. Her breasts were fuller than I remembered and her waist no longer lay flat between the bones of her pelvis. She saw me looking and sat up and drew her knees up in front of her.

“You’re very pale, Johnny.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you think about me in England?”

“I thought about everyone and everything. It got so I thought I’d go crazy with it.”

I saw from her face that this wasn’t the answer she wanted.

“Yes, I thought about you a lot.”

She looked out across the lake. “I used to come up here after you left. Until the water made me think of you on the other side of the world. Then I stopped.”

Her arms were folded on her knees. She turned her head and rested it on them and closed her eyes.

“You know, Johnny, if the past was a forest I’d burn it down.”

She stayed that way for a while, cradling her head in her arms. The air was hot and heavy around us and I thought she might be falling asleep. I watched her face, the dark lashes that lay against her skin, and wondered why she would say something like that.

“Were things that bad? I don’t mean me not being here, but life generally.”

She lifted her head and blinked. “Life generally? Yeah, life generally sucked.”

“How?

Marla lay down facing me and sighed. “I don’t want to get into it today, Johnny.”

She glanced past me and I turned to see what she was looking at. Back up the beach Bill Prentice was sitting on the grassy bank between the sand and the parking area. He was facing our way and though he was busily drinking from a can of soda I was certain that he had been watching us a moment before. I turned back to Marla.

“Tell me about your job.”

She shrugged. “The admin side’s okay. I take minutes. I organize filing, make appointments, set up meetings, that kind of thing. But I also get to research stuff and that can be cool. Like I’ll have to find out the history of a particular building, or some old fact about the Gold Rush. That’s the part I like most. If I hadn’t gotten this job I honestly don’t know how healthy I’d be now. Mentally, I mean. I have to take a piss.”

She stood and walked quickly away toward the parking area and the small cinder-block set of public toilets. I watched her as she went. The day was not going quite as I’d hoped. I’d pictured us sunbathing in each other’s arms by now. I rolled onto my back and closed my eyes.

Marla came back after a while and sat down beside me full of jittery energy and comic disbelief. She jerked her head toward the parking area. Bill Prentice was still there, but now he was standing with his hands in his pockets, looking straight at us.

“You know what he asked me?”

“Bill Prentice?”

“Yeah.” She laughed like it was the biggest joke, but it was a brittle sound and I could tell that she was nervous. “He wanted to—” She stopped herself and shook her head. “It’s too ridiculous.”

“What?”

“He wants to pay to watch us have sex.”

“You’re kidding.”

“That’s what he said.”

“You’re kidding.”

“You know about him, don’t you?”

“I’ve seen him in action.”

“What?”

“Stan and I saved him from a bear at an Elephant Society picnic the other day. He was getting blown by a cheerleader at the time.”

“A bear? Wow.”

Marla made me tell her about the episode, but before I was halfway through she interrupted me.

“You think doing something like that would be gross?”

“Having someone watch? I don’t know. Right place, right time, right person to do it with. Might be interesting.”

We’d been treating it as a joke but when I said this things suddenly became serious. Marla looked at me and I held my breath. After a long moment she shrugged.

“I guess we’ve got to start somewhere.”

And I, of course, figured that all my Christmases had come at once.

“Where would we do it?”

“He knows a place back in the forest. He wants it to be outdoors.”

“What did you say to him?”

“I said I’d ask you. He said he’d pay two hundred dollars. But you know we totally don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.”

“Yeah, well, I’m afraid I need the money too badly. Absolutely. In fact there’s no way I could possibly turn down two hundred dollars right now. Not at all. No sir.”

Marla nodded. “That’s what I thought.”

The air in the forest was so humid it seemed to push back at me and the buzzing of cicadas made my head swim. What we were doing was crazy but I couldn’t stop myself. The heat and the insect noise and the throb of sexual desire had combined within me to a kind of fever that made me want to race through the trees, to be wherever it was we were going, to be inside Marla right then, that second.

The place Bill led us to wasn’t far into the forest, but it was well screened and it was unlikely any nature-loving hiker would stumble across us. Behind a large boulder on which some delinquent teenager had splashed red paint there was a shallow dish-shaped hollow that was shielded around three-quarters of its circumference by a wall of trees and shrubs. As we entered it I was aware we were probably only a few minutes away from the place Marla and I had first made love.

Marla avoided looking at Bill or me. We had brought our things from the lake and she rolled out a towel in the center of the hollow. Bill sat a few feet away. I did my best to pretend he wasn’t there.

When Marla had finished with the towel she stood beside it, her arms straight at her sides as though she had no desire to make any further movement. I realized that she was scared.

Bill watched us like nothing else existed. His hand was between his legs, squeezing his crotch.

“Do you want us to, like, just start?”

Bill nodded. “Yes, please. And take all your clothes off.”

I stepped close to Marla and held her. For a moment she didn’t respond, then she lifted her head and looked at me sadly and whispered, “This shouldn’t have been our first time.”

I kissed her. And with that kiss I tried to pull us into a dark cocoon that would hide us from the man who sat watching. For a moment it worked, for a moment we were lost in each other. But then his voice came again.

“Take her clothes off.”

I knew, even as I began undoing her bikini top, that I should stop this, that she was uncomfortable, unhappy, that the honorable thing to do would be to just give Bill his money back and tell him we’d changed our minds. But I didn’t. I couldn’t let go of this opportunity. I wanted sex, there was no doubt about that, but what drove me more to peel away Marla’s swimsuit was a raging emotional greed, the need to be close enough to her again to begin fixing the piece of my past that belonged to her.

We got down to it, there in that warm hollow that like a lens seemed to capture the heat and concentrate it about us. When I entered her, despite being watched, despite the tawdry circumstances of the act, I felt an immediate and overpowering sense of relief. She had let me close to her. And if she could do that then surely there could be no further barrier to becoming a couple again. In Marla, too, I sensed a relaxation of spirit, as though she had wanted to clear this hurdle every bit as much as I.

This letting-go of hers, though, didn’t last long. At some point she shifted under me and I saw that she was looking over my shoulder at Bill. I turned my head. He was standing, pants around his ankles, masturbating as he watched us. It didn’t surprise me. In fact I had assumed he’d do exactly that, but it seemed to disgust Marla and she went stiff and kept her eyes closed until we were finished.

Bill left as soon as it was over, just buttoned his pants and walked quickly away. I thought about yelling after him to look out for bears, but I didn’t. Marla and I sat there silent and naked and watched him go. When he was out of sight I turned to her and forced a laugh.

“Well …”

I wanted her to laugh too, but she did not.

We got dressed and made our way back through the forest holding hands and not saying anything.

In the parking lot Bill Prentice was waiting beside his SUV. He waved for me to come over. Marla let go of my hand and went to wait by the pickup. Bill had the lease papers for the warehouse ready for me to sign—one year with the option to renew for two more, a reasonable yearly fee, three months up front, the rest in monthly installments. I signed them against the metal of the car’s hood and prayed that this venture with Stan would not turn out to be too disastrous.