“Take care of you?”
“Blowjob.”
“Fuck off. She doesn’t work for Gareth anymore and she’s not whoring herself to you.”
Jeremy Tripp looked at me like I was insane. “Your brother will go to prison. At the very least a psychiatric institution. Do you think he’ll ever be the same again? Do you think you will, knowing you could have saved him from it?”
I hated the idea of Marla going down on Jeremy Tripp, but it was the lesser of two evils. She would be a little more damaged because of it but she would still be Marla after it was over. Stan, though, most definitely would not be Stan if he was locked up for any length of time.
Of course she knew what I was thinking, or saw it in my face. She sighed and dropped to her knees in front of him and unzipped his fly. Over her head, Jeremy Tripp winked at me.
“Someone’s got some sense.”
I couldn’t watch and went to stand at the end of the room where the sink and the counter ran across the rear wall. When I got there I glanced over my shoulder. Jeremy Tripp’s back was toward me, buttocks clenching, hands wrapped in Marla’s hair. I turned away and braced myself against the counter, wishing the earth would open up.
When Jeremy Tripp started to make grunting noises my gaze wandered across the counter to the sink. To a large kitchen knife lying there waiting to be washed. I reached out and closed my hand around the brown wood of its handle. And then I turned and started quietly back across the floor.
Tripp had been taking his time but he wasn’t far away now and his hips were driving at Marla in hard thrusts, making her gag. I held the knife out in front of me. The distance between its blade and Tripp’s back was not great, maybe fifteen feet. I watched it narrow as I moved forward, this space that was all there was between the life and death of a man I hated.
Part of Marla’s face was visible past his right hip and she watched me with one eye.
I wanted to plunge the knife into his back and twist it. I wanted revenge for what he was doing to Marla, for what he had done to her in the past. I wanted revenge for the destruction of my brother’s hopes. I wanted this threat to our lives gone forever.
But I couldn’t do it. Halfway across the floor I stopped. For a moment I just stood there, pointing the knife at him. Then I turned around and walked back to the sink and stood looking blankly out of the window above it, listening to the sound of Jeremy Tripp ejaculating into Marla’s mouth.
Later, when he had gone, Marla brushed her teeth and stood at the sink and stared out the window with me.
She had done things like this before. She had been a hooker and had sex with men she didn’t know, she had been made to service Jeremy Tripp by Gareth, and she and I had performed in the forest for Bill Prentice. So going down on Jeremy Tripp that day wasn’t the worst thing she’d ever done. But it had happened in her home, and it had happened soon after Gareth had forced a similar experience on her.
I knew she didn’t want to talk about it but I felt I had to say something.
“Thank you.”
It was inadequate, I knew, but I thought anything else would sound self-serving.
Marla lit a cigarette and slowly pinched the flame of the match out between her thumb and forefinger. She didn’t flinch or make a sound. When she had smoked the cigarette she turned to me and said in an overly controlled voice, “Are you going to give him what he wants?”
“It won’t make any difference. He wants to destroy us, asking for the warehouse and the land is just another step along the way, but it’s not the end. All his attacks so far have been personal. He throws you out of your house, he fucks you in front of me, he poisons our plants, he sets up a competing firm, and for Gareth he’s wrecking the chances of a road to the lake. None of this is about getting anything material, it’s about revenge for Pat. And it’s not going to stop while any of us are still functioning. He’s going to tell the police about Stan whether I give him the land or not.”
“So?”
“Fuck, I don’t know…”
“You do, Johnny. I can see you thinking it.”
“You mean kill him? Do you think I’m that kind of person? Do you think I could actually kill someone?”
“What do you want me to tell you? That I’d be all right with it? Is that what you’re waiting for?”
“I’m not waiting for anything.”
“Because I am okay with it, Johnny. I am.”
“I couldn’t do it. I tried with the knife and I couldn’t.”
“I’m okay with it, but you have to know it’ll always be with you. You’ll never get rid of it.”
“I said I couldn’t do it!”
“But you’ve thought of a way, haven’t you?”
Marla’s voice was worn through with sadness. She ran her fingers over the back of my neck and without feeling it my legs buckled and I hit the floor with my knees and stayed there, holding her to me, my face pressed against her stomach, crying into the rough cotton of her shirt.
Later, I made a phone call to Gareth and then I went down to the river to tell Stan and Rosie it was safe to come out. In the corridor of less strongly growing trees that we now knew to be the course of the old riverbed I found that one of the holes my father had dug to take his samples had been enlarged to a small crater about five feet wide and waist-height deep. The walls of the hole were dark brown soil but its floor was made of something else, paler and more granular, a mixture of sand and gravel-unmistakably riverbed material.
There was nothing about it to indicate that it was laced with gold. But it was there, the bed of an old river, visible, touchable. Real. Until now it had been a blur on a photograph, the dream of a desperate man. But not any longer. I felt something tugging at me, skirting my reasoning mind, going straight for whatever part of me it was that wanted to believe in miracles.
I continued through the trees to the river. Stan and Rosie were sitting on the bank beside a pile of excavated dirt. They were holding hands and their backs were toward me. They seemed to be doing nothing but staring at the bright water that moved in front of them. Stan’s shovel lay on the ground near him, next to the gold pans.
When they heard me approaching they turned and for a moment I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. Both of them had something smeared on their faces. Against the glare of the water it looked dull and dark and I thought at first that it must be mud. But as I stepped closer I saw it was something else. Stan and Rosie had covered their faces with a slurry of water, crushed moths, and concentrates.
The mixture was almost dry and as their faces moved small pieces of it fell away. One of Stan’s hands lay closed in his lap. He raised it toward me and opened his fingers. A damp mound of concentrates lay creased in the center of his palm.
“Dad was right, Johnny. We only had to do five pans to get this.” He scraped the mix of black sand and gold dust off his hand into one of the pans beside him. “Dad never found so much in just five pans.”
I knelt and examined the concentrates. Without refining them properly it was impossible to tell exactly what proportion of gold they contained, but there was so much color there, so much dull yellow in the black sand, that it looked to me like Stan had panned at least an ounce of gold. It might be that not all of the buried river was so impregnated with wealth, but it showed that at least where Stan had dug it was very rich indeed.
“What do you have on your face?”
“I didn’t want anything to go wrong with getting the gold. I don’t want it to be like Plantasaurus. Rosie was helping me. Has Jeremy Tripp gone?”
“Yes, he’s gone.”
“He knows it was me, doesn’t he?”
“He was just asking questions.”
“Johnny!”
“Yes, okay, he knows, but it’s going to be all right.”
“How can it be all right?”