“How did it end?”
“Ray. But I was glad he ended it. There was never any love there. We were just company for each other. You must be disgusted.”
“I’m not disgusted.”
“I’m such a pig. It was an insane thing to do.”
Marla cast her eyes wildly about the bedroom. They came to rest on a small pair of nail scissors on her nightstand. I knew what was going through her mind.
“Don’t you fucking dare.” I reached past her and threw the scissors across the room.
Marla folded her arms over her chest. “When it was over I felt so sick with myself. That’s when I started hooking. I figured if I was such a pig I might as well act like one.” She shook her head and laughed sadly. “All I wanted was to live in Oakridge and be quiet and to just get by. If you can do that anywhere it should be here. But you can’t, you can’t do it anywhere, not if you’re the wrong sort of person. Are you going to leave me now?”
“Leave you? It was three years ago. I wasn’t even here, I hadn’t been for five years before that.”
“It doesn’t matter to you?”
“Of course it matters. I particularly don’t want to visualize the bedroom scenes. But I’m not going to leave you over it.”
I thought I would see some kind of relief in her face. Some great weight rising from her, freeing her of at least some of the hell she lived under, but it didn’t happen. She closed her eyes and hung her head, slowly turning it from side to side like a blind woman listening to something in the distance. It was disturbing to watch, but not as disturbing as when, a moment later, she threw back her head and opened her mouth, tears streaming from the corners of her eyes, and laughed at the ceiling-long, mad peals of noise as though she had just been told something so crushing that the only possible response was an insane, deformed humor.
I let it go on for as long as I could bear. She’d been caned, she’d been forced to confess to an affair with my father, some purging of emotion was understandable. But it was too raw and I became frightened that she was heading toward some sort of fit, so I held her and kissed her hair and at my touch she stopped her howling and buried her head in the hollow of my shoulder and sobbed quietly as I rocked her and made quiet noises to her until she fell asleep.
CHAPTER 26
I was buying vegetables in an open-fronted store in Back Town the next day when Gareth accosted me. He’d just turned away from something he’d been watching out on the street and when he saw me he came right over. When he said hello I just stared at him.
Gareth waved away my anger as though I had made a blunder that was too embarrassing to address. “Jesus, Johnny, you’re always focusing on the surface of things.
Lighten up. The other day was just something that had to happen.”
“What you made Marla do was disgusting.”
“Forget that shit. You gotta see what’s happening. You won’t believe it.”
He grabbed my arm and pulled me out onto the sidewalk.
“Look! Look what that fucking bitch is doing.”
A small van was rolling slowly along the street. It had posters taped to its sides and the front of a handheld loudspeaker stuck through the open driver’s window. It looked like something a small-town politician might use for electioneering. And it was being put to a similar use now. The posters displayed several different slogans, but they all boiled down to the same thing-that the proposed road to Tunney Lake should be stopped on environmental grounds. And backing the posters up, the loudspeaker demanded that we save one of our natural beauty spots, that we preserve it from the overexploitation that would certainly come with easier access.
“Look at her. I mean, am I insane? Did the world just take a vote and decide to fuck me in the ass? This is unbelievable.”
I followed his outstretched arm as it tracked the van. In the shadows of the cab, past the bullhorn, I saw the reason for his rage. Vivian was speaking into the microphone and driving one-handed.
“She’s been doing this for three days. And that’s not all. Come here.”
He pulled me along the street to a lamppost. Stapled to the dusty gray wood there was a flier outlining in more detail just what the negative effects of a blacktop road to the lake would be-from the destruction of forest to the death of wildlife to the erosion of the lake’s foreshore.
Gareth tore it from the pole and ripped it to pieces. “She’s putting them everywhere. She’s even stuck them to trees on the Loop. Where’s your car?”
“Around the block. Why?”
“I have something to show you.”
“Not interested.”
Gareth looked at me with dead eyes. “Your chum Jeremy Tripp’s involved.”
And so I found myself back at Tunney Lake, sitting in front of a blank TV in Gareth’s bedroom. Out in some other part of the bungalow I could hear David rolling around in his wheelchair and muttering to himself.
Gareth took a DVD from his nightstand and slid it into a player. “Tripp sent me this in the mail yesterday.”
He hit the remote and the disk started to play. I recognized the setting immediately. Jeremy Tripp’s house-the bedroom where I’d found Vivian wrapped in a towel. She was there again now, only she wasn’t by herself this time.
Jeremy Tripp had her on all fours in front of him on the bed. She was naked and he ploughed into her as though he was working out. On the screen I could see the bed inching across the floor with each of his thrusts. Vivian seemed unaware of the camera but Jeremy Tripp grinned straight at it from time to time and later, as he was finishing, he winked and gave it the finger. After he was done with Vivian they lay on the bed together for a minute or two, then she got up and walked into the bathroom. After she’d gone, Jeremy Tripp rolled off the bed, picked up the camera from wherever it had been resting, and panned it around to a dresser in a corner of the room. On top of this there were several neatly stacked reams of paper. He lifted a sheet from one of them and held it in front of the camera. For a moment the image blurred, then it sharpened again and the screen was filled with a close-up of a flier identical to the one Gareth had ripped from the telegraph pole in Back Town. Then the screen went black as the camera was turned off.
Gareth looked at me with his mouth open and his hands turned up. “What sort of fucking psycho is he? It explains her sudden interest in the road, though.”
“You think he put her up to it?”
“Of course he did. Jesus, Johnny. Vivian’s one of these cunts who live to find excuses to rant at the world. All you have to do is point her and pull the trigger. I used to tell her how much we needed the road when I was going out with her and she moaned about it even then. Now this asshole’s wound her up to the point where she thinks it’s her duty to save the community from it. The fucking eco-liberals on the council are going to eat it up with a spoon.”
“Well, thanks for sharing…” I stood up and started to leave but Gareth stopped me.
“Johnny, wait a minute. Let me ask you something. You hate this guy as well, right? Two plant businesses in one town? He’s gotta be fucking you up. If he wasn’t around, both of us would be a whole lot better off. I might even get Vivian back. What would you say to us making him not be around anymore?”
“And how would we do that?”
Gareth held my gaze. “How do you think?”
The idea was appalling, but at the same time I couldn’t help feeling a rush of desire to see Jeremy Tripp dead. When I didn’t say anything Gareth stood up.
“You owe me, Johnny. You’d be a dead man now if I hadn’t stopped those jocks from cutting you open.”