We spent the next couple of hours clearing the dead plants out of the warehouse. At one point I noticed that Stan had disappeared. I found him outside at the rear of the building, lying flat on his back in the dirt. He’d tipped the contents of his moth matchbox onto his face and the insects, dull from so long in the box, moved sluggishly in the depressions beside his nose and over his closed eyelids.
“What are you doing?”
“Recharging.”
I stood there for a moment, but he didn’t open his eyes, so I went back to work and a few minutes later he joined me and we didn’t talk about the moths.
After the cleaning up was done, we began our maintenance visits for that day. At each store or office, after we’d watered, trimmed, and cleaned the displays, we asked if the customers were satisfied with our service. No one had any complaints, and most of them were openly complimentary, but at three of the places they also said they had been approached by a representative of another plant company offering to provide the same level of service at a lower cost. One of the customers had a card the rep had left-tropical palm against a setting sun, the name Plantagion in orange letters. Another customer quoted the name from memory, said he remembered it because it sounded like a disease.
We’d signed all our customers to either six- or twelvemonth agreements and none of the three we spoke to that day wanted to pay the fee that early cancellation incurred. But I felt compelled to promise that we’d meet the competing offer when the agreements came up for renewal. Stan nodded seriously as I made this offer and stepped forward and shook their hands as we left.
At the end of the day, back at Empty Mile, Stan went over to see Rosie and I spent a long time sitting on the stoop, wondering what it was I had done that had pissed Jeremy Tripp off so badly.
CHAPTER 24
The next time I saw Gareth was the day before Marla moved into Empty Mile. Stan and I only had half a day’s work and after we’d finished I dropped him at Empty Mile and went back into town alone. Since my return to Oakridge there hadn’t been much of my time that wasn’t fraught with the stresses of trying to understand what was going on with my father, or Gareth, or Marla, or the Empty Mile land. And on this last day before Marla and I began living together I wanted an hour or two to myself, to grab a coffee, to gaze out of a café window.
I went to the Mother Lode in Old Town and was doing a pretty good job of not thinking about much when Gareth wandered in. He saw me right away and without bothering to order anything came quickly over and sat down across the table from me.
“Dude, you won’t believe it, we actually had a bunch of council assholes up at the lake today scoping things out. Wanted to discuss how we’d feel about restricted access on Lake Trail while they worked on the road! They still have to do what they call ‘canvassing the community’-some bullshit the eco-liberals stuck in to make sure the tree huggers are happy. But it’s movement, man, it’s movement!”
He clapped his hands and sat back grinning. It was only then that he noticed the stony look I was giving him.
“What’s the matter?”
“Wait here. I have to get something.”
I went outside to my pickup and got the two L-shaped brackets I’d stored in the glove compartment. Back in the café I dropped them on the table in front of Gareth.
“One’s from a tree in the forest at the lake, the other one your father gave to Stan when we were up at your place. They’re the same. The one I found on the tree was the one you fixed a camera to so you could film Marla and me while we fucked for Bill Prentice. I’ve seen the video.”
Gareth folded his arms. “Oh really? And where did you happen to stumble across that piece of cinema?”
“Bill’s cabin.”
“I wouldn’t have thought Bill would be showing it around.”
“He wasn’t home at the time.”
“You naughty boy.”
“I know you set the whole thing up.”
“Courtesy of Marla, no doubt.”
“I figured it out myself.”
“Bullshit.”
“She told me you forced her into it, you prick.”
“Oh, come on, Johnny, we had all this out before. Don’t call me a prick. You abandoned her, she wouldn’t have started hooking otherwise. Just like you abandoned your father, just like you abandoned your brother. Call me a prick? Fuck, man, I’m an amateur next to you. I’d never walk out on my father.”
“But you’d destroy some guy’s life. Why? Because of the fucking road?”
Gareth smiled slyly, though he tried to hide it. “You know how important that road is to us. And you know how it affected my dad when it didn’t get built.”
“Bill’s wife killed herself watching that video.”
“That sounds a bit farfetched.”
“I saw the disk in her bedroom when we found her. It was in the machine.”
“Careless old Bill.”
“You really are a fucking psycho.”
“Look, I made the vid to get some leverage on the road. I gave Bill a copy to show him I could fuck him up if he didn’t play ball. And seeing how the council guys came around today, maybe he took the hint. If his wife found it, it isn’t my fault. She was going to kill herself one day, anyhow.”
“But you made it happen.”
“You wanted to fuck Marla, Bill wanted to watch. Marla’s dumb enough to be exploitable. Bill thinks with his dick. Everyone made it happen, man. I just filmed it.”
Gareth stood up.
“I don’t know why you don’t want to be friends, Johnny.
I’m trying my hardest.”
After he left I ordered another coffee and sat trying to figure out why I had the feeling something didn’t quite add up. In the end the closest I got was that the idea of Bill leaving such a disk where anyone could find it was ludicrous.
So much for turning off for a couple of hours.
Marla moved into Empty Mile on a Friday. She took a day off work and we ferried her things over in the pickup starting early that morning. We were finished by noon. We spent another few hours distributing her stuff around the cabin and when that was done we were all set to begin life as a newly created family.
In the early evening, too tired from moving furniture to be bothered with cooking, Marla and I decided to go into town for dinner. Stan had invited himself to eat at Rosie’s and didn’t come with us.
We went to a cheap place in Back Town and ordered steaks and a bottle of red wine. Marla talked about things we could do to the cabin and it seemed that the activity of the day, perhaps some notion of a fresh start, had lifted her spirits a little. I told her about my conversation with Gareth at the Mother Lode, how he’d admitted to making the video, but she asked me not to spoil the evening and steered the conversation back to ideas for a vegetable garden and whether or not it would be too expensive to build a deck.
We finished our food and stayed to drink the last of the wine and by the time we left the restaurant we were both relaxed and a little drunk. So when we bumped into Chris Reynolds on the street, hurrying to that night’s Elephant Society meeting, and he reminded us that we’d promised to attend, trying to talk our way out of it seemed not only rude, but also too much effort.
We signed the attendance log at the door of the hall. There were only five names before us and the lecture heading printed in red at the top of the page read, Geological Reengineering Through Topographical Catastrophe-Randolph Morris. Chris, who hovered around us for a few moments, digging membership forms out of the desk where the door woman sat, “just in case you want to consider it,” sighed in resignation as he looked about the mostly empty hall.