Matthew Stokoe - Empty Mile

“He’s the only guy I know for that kind of thing.”

“So you’re what, in touch with him on a regular basis?”

“Jesus Christ! Didn’t you hear what I said? I’m telling you she got the pills off me, and all you’re worried about is if I’m seeing Gareth.”

“Are you?”

“Fuck.” Marla let out a breath and worked at not being angry. She reached across the table and took my hand.

“Why would I be seeing Gareth?”

She looked at me levelly until I gave in.

“Okay… Okay, I’m sorry. Were you close… with Pat?”

“She’d come around sometimes without Ray and we’d talk. I liked her but we weren’t girlfriends or anything.”

“Why didn’t she get her own pills?”

“Her doctor wouldn’t give them to her, I don’t know why.”

“Was she taking antidepressants?”

“Of course, she’d been on them for years.”

We finished our coffee and went outside and stood in the sunshine in front of the café while Marla smoked a cigarette.

“Do you think the thing with my father and Pat would have gone anywhere?”

Marla shook her head. “She would never have left Bill. He treated her like shit, fucked anything that moved, but she loved him. She had this dream that one day everything was going to come right between them. And Ray always seemed really uncomfortable with the whole affair thing.”

Marla rubbed the butt of her cigarette against the wall of the café and took a few steps along the sidewalk to a trash can. I watched her until movement a block away on the other side of the road caught my eye.

Bill Prentice, alone and wearing a dark suit, was running down the short flight of stone steps in front of the town hall toward us. From the expression on his face it looked like he was reprising the anger he’d exhibited toward me in his wife’s bedroom.

Marla stepped back from the trash can and stood close to me. Bill didn’t slow when he got to the sidewalk on our side and as I opened my mouth to make some sort of greeting he raised his fist and hit me hard enough on the side of the face to knock me down. I struggled to my feet as fast as I could, expecting further blows. But they didn’t come.

Bill stood before us, quivering, arms straight at his sides and rigid, his head turning in a narrow arc between Marla and me as though he couldn’t decide who to settle on. The tension in him was so great he seemed unable to speak and in those silent moments I saw a dreadful sadness replace his anger and I knew I was looking at a man for whom the world had become incomprehensible.

When he finally spoke his voice was strangled. “Why did you do it?”

“We just found her. We didn’t do anything.”

Bill looked around him as though he didn’t know where he was, then stared hard at me again and screamed, “I don’t understand!”

Marla moved forward a little. There was a tremor in her voice when she spoke. “Bill, you’ve had a terrible shock. You should be at home. Do you want me to take you?”

“You bitch! You fucking evil bitch! Do you know what you’ve done to me? What did I do to you? What did I do? I paid you. I didn’t touch you, I just watched. What did I do wrong?”

Marla looked uncertainly at me. I felt out of my depth. I didn’t understand his anger and I didn’t know how to help him.

“Bill, come on, man-”

“Fuck you! Fuck you!”

He broke down then, sobbing, clenching his fists in front of his chest. A couple of people on the sidewalk stopped to watch and one of the security guys from the town hall came over. He recognized Bill and stepped between us.

I felt Marla pulling me, dragging me away. It didn’t feel right to leave him like this, crying and so obviously broken, but she pulled harder and we walked away and left him there collapsed in the arms of the guard.

We went back to where I’d parked the pickup. We were both shaken and we locked the doors after we got in. Marla shuddered.

“He was talking about what we did at the lake.”

“Yeah.”

“Jesus Christ,” she groaned. I put my hand on her arm but she jerked away angrily.

“Don’t touch me!”

“He’s just feeling guilty. It’s not our fault if he feels bad about it now. We’re just someone he can take it out on.”

But Marla wasn’t listening. Without warning she twisted in her seat and slapped me across the face. The blow wasn’t hard but it caught me on the same side of the face as Bill’s punch and it stung.

“What the fuck!”

“Why did you have to leave me? Why the fuck couldn’t you have stayed? Look what you turned me into! Someone who can fuck in front of another man. I’m disgusting. We could have bought a house and had a kid. We would have been normal and clean. We would have been fucking happy.”

She put her face in her hands and fell against me and sobbed.

“Jesus, Johnny, Jesus…”

I held her and let her cry and stared blankly through the windshield. The town bustled about its business, people walked along the sidewalk, cars drove down the street, but I saw nothing through the glass except the cold shine of my own guilt. Later, when Marla had quieted, she went back to work and I drove fast along country roads for a long time with all the windows open and the air rushing in.

The day they buried Patricia Prentice my father was almost killed. And because I’d accepted his offer to drive into town with him and have breakfast before he started work, I was almost killed too.

Earlier, I’d tried to talk to him about Patricia Prentice but when I raised the subject his conversation became monosyllabic and guarded and he avoided saying anything except that he was okay and I shouldn’t worry about him. I didn’t press the point, I knew from experience that any coming to terms he had to do he’d do deep down inside, in that hidden part of himself where his emotions were sealed.

The end of our street joined a long road that ran downhill. As my father turned the car into it I saw him frown a little.

“Brakes are a bit soft.”

He shrugged and wound down his window. We gathered speed and he took an exaggerated breath of the air coming in.

“I like this time of morning. Before everything starts.”

He frowned again.

“These brakes really don’t feel right.”

There was very little traffic about at this time and going downhill we’d reached a speed of about fifty miles an hour. A hundred yards ahead of us the road curved sharply to the left where it crossed a culvert before flattening out against the floor of the basin. We needed to slow quickly to make the turn but the car continued to pick up speed. I looked across at my father. He was staring through the windshield, gripping the wheel so hard his knuckles showed white beneath the tan of his hands. His right foot pumped rapidly on the brake pedal. He shouted, “The brakes have gone. Hold on!”

He yanked the emergency brake and the scream of the locking rear tires added to the cacophony of sound that had suddenly engulfed us-the engine of the car, the rush of our passage through air and over tarmac, the thudding of our hearts and the roar of our blood, our shouts in the last sickening second as we entered the turn, my father wrenching the wheel around, fighting the weight of the car.

“Cover your face, John!”

And then the howl of the wheels losing their grip and the sideways drift of the car, beyond any hope of control now, out across the angle of the curve as though it floated on oil, the white beams of the guardrail across the edge of the culvert suddenly at my window. And then our impact, a single explosive bang and a hail of shattered glass, the final slewing through a quarter turn, the lurching drop as the back of the car went through the guardrail and over the concrete edge of the culvert, the shriek of metal being scraped from the bottom of the car. And then silence.