Matthew Stokoe - Empty Mile

“What?”

Gareth looked suddenly aghast. He did a good job of it, but I knew he was putting it on.

“Oh, don’t tell me you don’t know! Please tell me you know.”

“What?”

“That she hooks. I mean not all the time, man. But sometimes. Just now and then. I thought you two would have gone through all of that.”

“I don’t know what’s going on here, but I’m not taking Marla anywhere.”

Gareth looked somber. “Well, I’m sorry, Johnny, but you have to.”

“I’ll take one of your other girls.”

“I wish I could, but this guy asked for her specifically. He doesn’t want anyone else.”

“What do you mean, asked for her specifically? If he’s a new customer how would he even know about her?”

“Beats me, but he does, ’cause he asked for her by name.”

“You’re fucking insane.”

“Johnny, listen. I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do. I need the money to keep this place going. I start not giving people what they want and pretty soon they’re going to stop calling me.”

“So fucking what?”

Gareth didn’t say anything else, he just stood there with his hands on his hips and no expression on his face. I stood there too. I had no intention of moving until he gave in. But then I heard Marla’s voice behind me, calling sadly from the open window of the truck.

“Johnny.”

I didn’t turn and she called again.

“Johnny.”

I looked over my shoulder then and she beckoned me with a small despairing movement of her hand.

“Get in. Please.”

For a moment I hesitated, caught up in my anger, wanting to force Gareth to back down. But then it dawned on me that the simplest solution was to get in the pickup and just drive her home. So I told Gareth to get fucked, climbed into the truck, and drove down the hellish trail to the Oakridge Loop. I didn’t speak on the way down, in the dark it took all my concentration to negotiate the broken surface of the trail, but when we hit the blacktop I pulled the pickup over.

“What the fuck is this all about?”

“Keep driving, Johnny, please.”

“No, I want you to tell me what’s going on.”

“Start the truck and I’ll explain.”

I pulled out onto the road again and after a minute or two Marla began to speak.

“A couple of years ago, maybe a bit more, I was in a bad way. The kind of bad way where the world around you seems smashed to pieces and you feel smashed right along with it. I didn’t have anything left to care about anymore. I didn’t have a job, I didn’t have you, I hadn’t paid rent in months, and one day I got the final notice on the house. The night I decided to do it, it felt like everything left of me worth saving or protecting was so close to dying it didn’t matter what I did. So I got in my car and drove over to Burton and I stood on a street corner where there were some other girls doing the same thing and… and I did it.”

She took a cigarette from a pack in her purse. Her hands shook as she lit it. She blew smoke at the floor and kept her head bent and didn’t look at me.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?”

I looked out at the black road, at the wash of white light from my headlights, and wondered if there was anything I could say. I couldn’t make it not have happened, the same as I couldn’t not feel my anger. In the end I just shook my head.

Marla sighed, she sounded like a child that had cried itself out. “I hated it. I did it for a year and I hated every second of it. Then finally I woke up and thought what the fuck am I doing? I was going to stop, I really was, but then Gareth found out.”

“So you went to work for him instead. For what, old times sake?”

“Don’t be a bastard. I didn’t have a choice.”

“Oh yeah, how’s that?”

“I got arrested. And by some hideous coincidence Gareth was in Burton at the time. He saw me on the street and when I got into some guy’s car and we parked in an alley he followed to watch. And while he was watching a patrol car came along and I got busted. He didn’t use it at first. I guess when it happened I didn’t have enough to lose to make me a blackmail target. But then I got my job and he realized he could make me do whatever he wanted. All it would take was one phone call from him and they’d fire me, they’d have to-you can’t have a hooker working for the town council.”

“You let him pimp you just so you could keep your job?”

“It’s too important to me. That job makes me feel like a normal person, like all the people who have proper houses and families and husbands. Without it all I’ll ever be is a waitress and an ex-hooker.”

Marla put her cigarette out in the ashtray.

“I don’t suppose it helps, but it wasn’t like it was a full-time thing. He’d make me do it once every couple of months. It was more about control than money.”

“I feel like I’m in the Twilight Zone.”

“I told you the first day you came around I wasn’t the same person you left behind.”

“You didn’t tell me you were that different.”

“How could I? All I’d dreamed of for eight years was that you’d come back to me. I wasn’t going to risk losing that. You know, Johnny, everybody gets ruined by the past one way or another. You aren’t the only one.”

“Well, you’re not doing it tonight.”

“I am.”

“What are you talking about? I’ll see Gareth tomorrow and tell him to fuck off.”

“No, you won’t. If I don’t do it he’ll call the council, and I am not losing my job. I had it before you came back and I’m not giving it up just because you suddenly felt the need to come home and try and fix your past.” She put her hand on my arm and her voice softened. “I’m not even there when it happens.”

“Don’t give me that shit. There aren’t too many other places you can be when you’re flat on your back with some guy on top of you.”

Her tone changed abruptly and she pulled away. “You might want to consider that we wouldn’t be having this conversation if you’d shown some fucking spine and hadn’t run away to London. Do you think I would ever have started doing it then? Ever?”

We’d entered the town by then and the darkness of the forest had been replaced by the orange glow of streetlights. There were people walking around in the warm night and through the windows of restaurants and bars life gently ticked away the minutes and the hours. And suddenly my anger faded and I wanted the dirt of this night to be gone. I wanted to stop the pickup and park and take Marla into a bar and forget everything that had ever happened in her past and in mine and just have a drink and some food and be alive in the present. For once. For one goddamned moment.

And I wanted Marla not to be right. But I knew what she said about me and what I’d done to her was true. And I knew I didn’t have the right to force her to lose something she held dear. I’d taken too much away from her already.

So, on the other side of Back Town I didn’t take the road up to my house, but turned instead onto the long dark grade of the forest road that led up to the Slopes.

“What’s the address?”

Marla gripped my arm tightly and whispered, “I’m so sorry, Johnny.”

She passed me a scrap of paper. I recognized the street name, but it wasn’t until I turned into it ten minutes later that it finally dawned on me what our destination was.

Lights buried in the ground threw columns of gold against the white front of Jeremy Tripp’s house. The plants in the garden and beside the driveway caught the light on the edges of their leaves so that they looked like ornaments placed for effect.

I should have stayed in the pickup, I should have let Marla climb out and go to the house by herself and do what she had to do. I should have waited for her out there on the dark street and tried not to think, or maybe gone driving in some attempt to distract myself until it was time to pick her up again. But I didn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to let go of her. So I walked with her to the front door and stood close as she rang the bell and waited.