“Might not be the most exciting of meetings, I’m afraid.”
He wandered off to sit in the first row of a block of chairs that had been set up in front of a movable whiteboard. I looked at the woman behind the desk. She smiled and shrugged apologetically.
“Randolph’s already given his talk once this year. It’s his only subject. A lot of the members tend to skip it.”
Marla and I sat in the back row. With so few people the hall seemed overly quiet and a little sad, like something that had been passed by and was now only a place for people too out of touch to know better.
Chris Reynolds stood up in front of the whiteboard and began to go through the minutes of the last meeting. I listened for a while and tried to stay interested in the state of the Society’s finances, the plans for the next outing, some sort of communication from a sister society in Australia… but the wine and the tiredness from moving Marla’s furniture began to catch up with me and in the dim hall I found my attention drifting so that periodically I had to drag myself back from some hazy other-world where I had been aimlessly turning over the trivia of daily life-groceries to buy, calculating if I had enough gas to get home…
On one of these returns I saw that Chris Reynolds had been replaced in front of the whiteboard by a grizzled old guy who was pointing to parts of a diagram thrown against the board by an overhead projector. The diagram was a topographical map of some area and appeared to show a number of rivers winding between blobs of concentric altitude lines.
I guessed the guy was Randolph Morris and that we were now in the middle of the lecture so many of the Elephant Society’s members had stayed away from. He spoke without pause in a zealot-like tone, grinding out figures on the history of seismic upheaval, erosion and the localized collapse of geological features in area after area around the world and throughout the United States. His point seemed to be that occurrences like earthquakes and landslides had in some cases been responsible for altering the course of ancient rivers and that the riverbeds they’d left behind-what he called “tertiary rivers”-could still be found through geomagnetic surveys, aerial photography, and something known as “cesium vapor analysis.” Where a river that existed nowadays cut through one of these tertiary rivers there was a good chance that it would contain rich deposits of gold. In fact, Randolph asserted, many of the larger strikes during the Gold Rush could be explained in this manner.
I’d never heard of tertiary rivers before and the idea was interesting, but Randolph spoke in such a torrent of words and repeated himself so often that after a couple of minutes I found myself again wondering about what to buy at the store.
In the end I dozed off. When Marla nudged me awake Randolph and the other Society members were already filing out of the hall and Chris Reynolds was pushing the whiteboard into a corner. The lady at the door was gone. Marla and I went over to Chris and said goodbye. He smiled a little sheepishly and shook my hand.
“You’re welcome if you ever want to come back some other night.”
Marla and I were halfway across the hall when he called after us.
“Hey, Johnny, I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but there’s another plant company making the rounds, looking for business.”
“Yeah, Plantagion. I know about them.”
“The owner came into the Nugget Shooter a couple of days ago, tried to talk me into going with them. I told him I was happy with Plantasaurus.”
“Thanks. We’d really hate to lose anyone.”
“I figured. Funny thing, though, this guy-we talked for a bit, and because I hadn’t seen him around before I asked him how long he’d been in Oakridge. Turns out not long, moved here after his sister died.” Chris paused for a moment. “Guess who his sister was.”
I shrugged.
“Patricia Prentice. Bill Prentice’s wife. Funny who you meet, huh?” He gave a small wave and headed off toward the office at the back of the hall.
I asked Marla to drive us home. I sat in the passenger seat of the pickup with a rushing in my ears, as though some angry autumn storm blew privately around me. Everything suddenly made sense. The scene with Jeremy Tripp in front of our customers, the break-in at the warehouse and the destruction of our stock, the rival firm setting up in competition to us, even Marla’s enforced prostitution episode and eviction from her house.
These things hadn’t happened randomly. They weren’t unplanned. They hadn’t even happened, or at least not primarily, because Jeremy Tripp wanted to build a hotel on the warehouse land. These things had happened for an old-fashioned reason that you saw in movies and read about in books but never thought could possibly be part of your own life. These things had happened because of a desire for revenge.
Jeremy Tripp’s sister was dead, pushed to suicide by a video. And because Marla and I were the star performers he blamed us for her death. I was certain of it. Of course, that meant he had to know about the video. But being Pat’s brother meant he was also Bill’s brother-in-law, close enough for Bill to swallow whatever guilt he felt and share that piece of amateur pornography with someone who had the personality to seek retribution for what it had caused. I remembered the night I’d seen them through the window of Bill’s cabin watching something on the TV. I remembered the look of desolation on Bill’s face and the way the muscles about Jeremy Tripp’s jaw had clenched.
Jeremy Tripp believed we killed his sister and he was going to make us pay. But he wasn’t a hit man. He wasn’t a thug with a baseball bat. He was a corporate executive with a lot of money. When I first met him he’d talked about destroying someone, not physically hurting them, but destroying their entire life. And this is what he had begun to do to us. Get at Marla by kicking her out of her house. Get at both of us by hiring her as a prostitute and making me watch. Get at me again by attacking Plantasaurus, not because he cared if I suffered financially, but because he knew it would destroy Stan and by doing so hurt me worst of all.
Plantasaurus had not gone under yet. We had enough money, just, to buy replacements for the plants that had been bleached to death, but I knew we couldn’t take another hit like that without the business folding.
But there would be another hit. And another, and another after that, until Plantasaurus no longer existed. I’d seen the way Jeremy Tripp had fucked Marla, I’d seen him shoot the rabbit with his bow and arrow and leave it to scream through the night without a second thought, and I knew that he was a man who would not stop until he got the revenge he wanted. And I couldn’t let that happen to Stan. I couldn’t let something I’d done destroy his dream.
There was no point in telling Stan that Jeremy Tripp was Patricia’s brother, no need to make him even more worried about the future of Plantasaurus, so I didn’t mention the evening’s discovery to him when we got back to the cabin. But Marla and I discussed it as we lay in bed. Or rather I talked about it and she made noises in the right places-cursed when I suggested it was the reason she had lost her house, shook her head in disgust at the threat to Plantasaurus. But there was an underlying current of disinterest to her responses, as though she didn’t really want to engage. Eventually I called her on it.
“You don’t seem very worried.”
“I’m worried.”
“Come on. You’re lying there like I’m talking about football.”
“Johnny, it happened. Knowing he’s Pat’s brother doesn’t change anything.”
“It changes what’s going to happen. He’s going to keep at us until we’re completely fucked.”
Marla took a breath and said quietly, “Maybe it’s what we deserve. I do, anyhow.”