Matthew Stokoe - Empty Mile

The cop took the disk out of its cover and nodded to himself. “ Barefoot in the Park. I like that movie.”

The DVD was a commercially recorded rental and certainly not the disk I had seen when Stan and I first found Patricia. Bill was lying. I was pretty sure he had the real disk concealed under his windbreaker. But what difference did it make? If Pat had been watching something more personal than a Hollywood love story-a family video of happier times, perhaps-who was I to interfere if Bill wanted to keep part of this horrible event private? So I said nothing. And Stan, who had paid no attention to the DVD beyond wanting the TV to be quiet, had no idea that there was anything to say nothing about.

Stan and I went outside again, but Bill stayed in the bedroom with his dead wife. We spent another half hour making formal statements which the cops typed into a computer in their car; after that they told us we could go.

When we got home, Stan put on his Captain America suit, jammed his glasses on over the mask, and settled himself in front of the TV. I made him the peanut butter sandwiches he asked for and he sat and munched and focused his attention on some Japanese action cartoon.

“How come you put the costume on?”

“Huh?”

“The costume. Why?”

Stan looked down at himself and smoothed the red, white and blue material over his belly. He turned his attention back to the TV and said without looking at me, “Protection.”

He didn’t answer when I tried to talk to him further, so I went into the kitchen and called my father and told him about Pat. The conversation was not long. I outlined what had happened, he asked for details and then he was silent. He cleared his throat a couple of times but was unable to say anything else. Eventually he thanked me and we hung up.

I went upstairs to my room and lay down on the bed and called Marla on my cell and gave her the same news. After we’d arranged to meet the next day I put the phone down and turned on my side and closed my eyes. The windows were open and a hot, slow breeze moved over me.

I woke to Stan shaking my shoulder. It was dark outside but the light was on in the room and moths pestered the bulb. Stan was still in his Captain America suit.

“Dad’s downstairs. Something’s wrong.”

“What time is it?”

“He came in and went into the kitchen and when I said hi he wouldn’t lift his head up. He just kept staring at the table. He’s got a bottle of booze.”

“Booze?”

“Yeah, booze .”

“He’ll be all right, don’t worry. I’ll go see him. You go to bed.”

“Shouldn’t I come down with you?”

“No, just let me talk to him.”

“Okay, Johnny.”

I walked Stan along the landing to his room. He climbed under the covers of his bed and took off his glasses and mask.

“Aren’t you going to get rid of the costume?”

Stan shook his head.

“Are you okay about Pat?”

“Yeah. You don’t have to worry about me, Johnny.”

He nestled against his pillow and for a moment I saw him as a young boy again and was freshly overcome with a sense of loss for all the time that had passed while we were not together.

I turned out the light and went downstairs to see my father. He was sitting at the kitchen table in his suit. His tie was loose at his throat and his hair was mussed. There was a half-full glass and a bottle of whiskey on the table in front of him. He looked up as I came into the room and smiled weakly. He was a man who rarely drank and he seemed embarrassed at himself.

“I’m afraid I’m a little drunk.”

“Are you okay?”

“Just had a few at the office after work.”

“Dad, I know you were seeing Patricia Prentice. Marla told me about the room.”

“Oh… I see.”

He nodded slowly. Everything about him was heavy-the words he pushed from himself into the over-bright kitchen air, his head on his shoulders, his arms bent on the table. His gaze would not hold mine and slid constantly to his hands. He seemed a man monumentally overwhelmed by the weight of being alive.

He lifted his glass and drank from it like a child forcing down medicine, then coughed and wiped his eyes.

“Pat was a person who needed emotional support. Her mistake was looking for it in me.” He shook his head disgustedly. “I couldn’t give her what she wanted. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to. I did. I just didn’t have it in me.”

“I don’t think there was much you could have done either way. She was a sick woman.”

My father poured another drink and swallowed it. He was very drunk. His words were beginning to slur.

“What sickens me is that I always had it in the back of my head that if I stayed with her long enough some of her money might rub off on me. And all the time I was thinking about money, she was thinking about killing herself.”

He slumped forward on the table and put his head in his arms. I waited for several minutes until I thought he must have fallen asleep. I was going to rouse him and try and get him up to bed, but when I shook him he lifted his head and told me to leave him where he was. There wasn’t much else I could do, so I put a glass of water on the table next to him and headed out of the room. As I reached the doorway he called to me.

“Johnny, that friend you used to have-Gareth.”

“What about him?”

“He isn’t the sort of man you want to be mixed up with.”

He pointed his finger at me. His face was swollen and loose and his eyes were bleary.

“You hear me?”

“Yeah.”

“Good…”

He dropped his head into his arms again and his breath came out in a sob.

The room felt abandoned, as though everywhere outside was empty and gone. The electric clock on the stove ratcheted painfully through the minutes and the light from the ceiling bulb made things dirty around the edges. I felt terribly sad standing there watching my father. It seemed to me, at that moment, that the world was nothing more than a place where lives fell apart.

Stan asked me to drive him to work the next day. Bill Prentice was unlikely to be in and he wanted to be there to help out as much as he could. After I’d dropped him off I headed into Back Town to meet Marla. She worked in a modern-looking annex the council had built for its administrative staff a block away from the town hall itself. We went to a café called the Black Cat opposite her building. It was a basic place with plain tables and hard chairs and had been around long before gold town nostalgia became the obligatory decorative motif for eateries in Oakridge.

At breakfast and lunch the place was busy with workers from neighboring businesses but midmorning it was almost empty and Marla and I had our pick of the tables. We sat at the front of the place by one of the large plate-glass windows. Around us sunlight picked out dust motes in the air and the occasional chink of plates from back in the kitchen seemed somehow to point up the loneliness of this in-between time.

Marla looked efficient in her office clothes but under her lipstick and eyeliner she was pale and her eyes were tired.

We talked about Pat dying. When I told her it looked like an overdose of sleeping pills she tensed and began twisting a napkin between her hands.

“What sort of sleeping pills?”

“Halcion.”

“Oh Jesus…” For a moment she closed her eyes. “I gave them to her.”

“What?”

“I gave her the pills.”

“To kill herself?”

“No! For fucksake, Johnny. She couldn’t sleep, she wanted something. I was going to get her some grass, but when I asked Gareth all he had was pills.”

“Hang on, why are you asking Gareth anything?”