I was about to say no when I remembered that I was now technically the owner of the land at Empty Mile. I told Peter about the transfer of title.
He nodded and thought for a moment, then cleared his throat. “Okay. Given the situation with your father I’m sure we can put the payments on hold for a few weeks to give you some thinking room. But what it’s going to come down to is one of four options. You make the mortgage payments; you don’t make the payments and the bank forces a mortgagee sale of the house; you make payments until your father is officially declared dead and you can then legally sell the house yourself; or you sell the Empty Mile land and, if it realizes sufficient funds, you pay off the mortgage and keep the house.”
“Jesus.”
Stan reached over and tugged at my sleeve. “We gotta keep the house, Johnny.”
Peter made an unhappy face. “It’s a horrible situation. But unless your father reappears there really are only a set number of outcomes.”
He walked us to the bank’s front door. As it slid open he put his hand against the back of my shoulder.
“I’ll see what we can do about that freeze.”
And then Stan and I were outside on the sidewalk again in the sun and the heat with people passing by. Stan lifted the matchbox he was holding to his nose and breathed deeply.
“What’s that?”
“We don’t have enough power, Johnny.”
“Let me see.”
He handed over the box. I pushed it a little further open and saw two silvery-brown moths fluttering limply inside.
“Don’t be mad, Johnny, okay? Please?”
I closed the box and gave it back to him and we worked through another day at our plant business.
CHAPTER 15
If I hadn’t been so worried about money I wouldn’t have accepted Gareth’s second offer of prostitute driving work. Plantasaurus, though it was gathering momentum and gaining new customers every few days, was not yet covering costs and our expenses were being met out of what dwindling savings Stan and I had left. On top of this there was the fresh financial wound of the house mortgage. The bank had given us a one-month freeze on the loan, but after that I’d either have to start making payments or show that plans were underway to sell the Empty Mile land. So when Gareth called and offered his standard fifty dollars it seemed stupid to turn the money down.
Around nine p.m. I got into the pickup and headed for Gareth’s place at Tunney Lake. I left Stan watching TV in the living room. He said it would creep him out to go to bed while there was no one else in the house so he was going to stay up till I got home.
At the lake only the office and the last cabin in the row showed any light. As I pulled up, the office door opened and Gareth stepped out onto the porch and stood there waiting while I walked over to him. By the light of the overhead bulb I could see that he was smiling.
“Thanks for helping out again, dude.”
“No problem. End cabin?”
Gareth stayed smiling but he shook his head slowly. “Nope. I have her right here.”
He reached for someone out of sight behind him in the office and pulled. Whoever it was seemed to be resisting him and he had to half turn to exert more strength before he could pull her out through the doorway.
When he did, I felt something run through me that I had not experienced since I’d seen Stan laid out at the edge of the lake twelve years before-a sensation of my insides draining in a rush down through my body and out. For an instant I thought I might not be able to stay standing. Because the girl who now stood beside Gareth was Marla.
“What’s going on?”
“Just what we talked about, dude. Easy money for you, even more easy money for me. Special request from a new customer.”
Gareth let go of Marla’s arm and gave her a small shove. She stepped down off the porch and walked quickly to my truck. She had her eyes on the ground and she didn’t look up as she passed me. I heard her climb inside and close the door.
“Is this a joke?”
“It’s business.”
“You expect me to take Marla so some guy can fuck her?”
“What’s the problem? It isn’t the first time she’s done it.”
“What?”
Gareth looked suddenly aghast. He did a good job of it, but I knew he was putting it on.
“Oh, don’t tell me you don’t know! Please tell me you know.”
“What?”
“That she hooks. I mean not all the time, man. But sometimes. Just now and then. I thought you two would have gone through all of that.”
“I don’t know what’s going on here, but I’m not taking Marla anywhere.”
Gareth looked somber. “Well, I’m sorry, Johnny, but you have to.”
“I’ll take one of your other girls.”
“I wish I could, but this guy asked for her specifically. He doesn’t want anyone else.”
“What do you mean, asked for her specifically? If he’s a new customer how would he even know about her?”
“Beats me, but he does, ’cause he asked for her by name.”
“You’re fucking insane.”
“Johnny, listen. I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do. I need the money to keep this place going. I start not giving people what they want and pretty soon they’re going to stop calling me.”
“So fucking what?”
Gareth didn’t say anything else, he just stood there with his hands on his hips and no expression on his face. I stood there too. I had no intention of moving until he gave in. But then I heard Marla’s voice behind me, calling sadly from the open window of the truck.
“Johnny.”
I didn’t turn and she called again.
“Johnny.”
I looked over my shoulder then and she beckoned me with a small despairing movement of her hand.
“Get in. Please.”
For a moment I hesitated, caught up in my anger, wanting to force Gareth to back down. But then it dawned on me that the simplest solution was to get in the pickup and just drive her home. So I told Gareth to get fucked, climbed into the truck, and drove down the hellish trail to the Oakridge Loop. I didn’t speak on the way down, in the dark it took all my concentration to negotiate the broken surface of the trail, but when we hit the blacktop I pulled the pickup over.
“What the fuck is this all about?”
“Keep driving, Johnny, please.”
“No, I want you to tell me what’s going on.”
“Start the truck and I’ll explain.”
I pulled out onto the road again and after a minute or two Marla began to speak.
“A couple of years ago, maybe a bit more, I was in a bad way. The kind of bad way where the world around you seems smashed to pieces and you feel smashed right along with it. I didn’t have anything left to care about anymore. I didn’t have a job, I didn’t have you, I hadn’t paid rent in months, and one day I got the final notice on the house. The night I decided to do it, it felt like everything left of me worth saving or protecting was so close to dying it didn’t matter what I did. So I got in my car and drove over to Burton and I stood on a street corner where there were some other girls doing the same thing and… and I did it.”
She took a cigarette from a pack in her purse. Her hands shook as she lit it. She blew smoke at the floor and kept her head bent and didn’t look at me.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?”
I looked out at the black road, at the wash of white light from my headlights, and wondered if there was anything I could say. I couldn’t make it not have happened, the same as I couldn’t not feel my anger. In the end I just shook my head.
Marla sighed, she sounded like a child that had cried itself out. “I hated it. I did it for a year and I hated every second of it. Then finally I woke up and thought what the fuck am I doing? I was going to stop, I really was, but then Gareth found out.”
“So you went to work for him instead. For what, old times sake?”