Matthew Stokoe - Empty Mile

Marla looked pale and frightened and the skin under her eyes was dark. I put my hands on her shoulders.

“I don’t think Gareth has anything to do with this.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“No, I mean it. I went to see him yesterday, about this pimping bullshit. He told me he was going to leave you alone, now that he knows we’re together. He even apologized.”

“Doesn’t sound like Gareth.”

“I think he meant it. You’re in the book, Tripp could have gotten your last name when he spoke to Gareth and found out where you live himself.”

“So, what, he thinks now he can come around and fuck me whenever he wants? Jesus Christ!”

We made coffee and stood around expecting Tripp to knock on the door at any moment. As Marla raised her cup I noticed a long thin burn on the inside of her forearm.

“What happened?”

She shrugged and didn’t say anything. I took hold of her arm and looked more closely at the burn. The blister was about four inches long and the skin that bordered it was singed a pale brown and looked dry and dead.

“What the fuck happened?”

She pulled her arm away. “I told you last night, I’m a pig. And people who act like pigs should be punished.”

“You did that to yourself? Christ! How?”

“I heated up a knife on the stove.”

“Marla, this is terrible.”

“No, it’s not. It’s exactly right.”

I was about to say more, but the bubble of toxic emotion that had formed around us was punctured then by a loud knocking on the front door. Marla looked stricken and groaned.

“I can’t do it again. I can’t…” She trudged along the hall to the front of the house and tiredly pulled the door open.

On the porch, Jeremy Tripp stood beside a smaller man who wore a smooth dark suit and held a large manila envelope. Beyond them, in the driveway, a new-looking silver sedan sat under a pattern of leaf shadow. Jeremy Tripp lit his face up with a high-voltage expression.

“Time to fuck off and find somewhere else to live.”

The man with Jeremy Tripp cleared his throat. He reached into his jacket pocket and held out a business card. “Gerald Turnbull. I act as Mr. Tripp’s lawyer in this matter.”

Marla frowned. “What matter?”

“Slight change of landlord,” Jeremy Tripp hissed.

The lawyer cleared his throat again. He opened the envelope he was carrying and drew out several pieces of paper which had been stapled together. He held the papers out to us and turned the sheets one by one so that we could see their contents. They looked like they formed some sort of contract.

Marla shrugged. “So?”

“So, today Mr. Tripp closed the sale of this property.”

“What?”

“He owns this house now. Your previous landlord, Mr. Constantian, sold it to him.”

“Bullshit.” Marla snatched the papers from him and looked through them closely. A few moments later her arm dropped and the lawyer took his papers back. “He never said anything to me about selling.”

“The sale was conducted somewhat more rapidly than usual.”

Jeremy Tripp turned the palms of both hands up and grinned. “One of the happy consequences of having a lot of money.”

“You are fucking kidding. You’re my landlord?”

“Not for long.”

The lawyer reached into his envelope again and took out another sheet of typewritten paper. “You rent this house on a month-by-month basis. You don’t have a lease. Mr. Tripp would like you to quit the property as soon as possible, and in any case not later than six weeks.”

He held out the sheet. Marla took it and looked at it so blankly the lawyer frowned.

“That means six weeks from today. Do you understand?”

Marla shook her head. “This is my house. I’ve lived here ten years.” She turned to Jeremy Tripp. “Why are you doing this? You don’t need this place. I can’t leave here.”

“Oh, I think you can probably do anything you put your mind to.” He looked up at the sky and the trees around him and took a deep breath. “What a day.”

He turned and walked down the porch steps. At the bottom he looked back at me.

“You know what? If you and your dumb-ass brother had a bit of competition you might raise your game. Might be good for you. What do you think?”

Then he turned and headed back along the drive and out to the road. The lawyer checked inside his envelope to see if he’d missed anything then nodded goodbye and went down and got into the silver sedan. Marla slammed the front door so hard the glass rattled.

We lay on her bed and I held her as the light outside the windows softened into late afternoon. I knew what this eviction meant to her. She had no family of her own, no hometown to go back to for Christmases and birthdays, no childhood repository of happy memories. This house had become all of these things for her and losing it would rob her of the largest piece of the life she had managed to create for herself.

She threw her head back and sighed. “I thought I’d end up buying this house. It’s the one thing, the one thing I’ve managed to hang on to.”

“You don’t know this Tripp guy outside of the other night, right?”

“I never saw him before in my life.”

“Then this is getting weird.”

I told Marla about his visit to the warehouse, how he’d poisoned the plants and driven our customers away. “He was obviously trying to hurt our business. Now, for some reason, he wants to hurt you too. I don’t understand what’s going on.”

“Maybe it’s a man thing, like he has to destroy the whore he slept with.”

“But buying a house to do it?”

“Yeah, I’d have to be a monumentally bad lay.” Marla tried to smile at her own joke but just ended up looking sadder.

I stayed at her place as long as I could before I had to pick up Stan. When I left I asked her to come with me but by then she was so thoroughly depressed she’d curled into a ball on the bed and wouldn’t move.

In the pickup, on the way back from Rosie’s house, Stan had a smirk on his face and kept giving me sideways looks.

“Okay. What is it?”

He turned toward me and smiled painfully. “I did it.”

“Did what?”

“With Rosie. We had sex.”

I’d known it would happen at some point, but now that it had I didn’t really know how to react.

“Wow… That’s pretty big.”

Stan must have mistaken my hesitancy for disapproval because he spoke quickly. “It’s all right, she can’t have babies.”

“I know. Her grandmother told me. It’s okay, dude. I don’t think it’s wrong or anything, I’m just, you know, taking it in.”

“It was my first time.”

“I figured. How do you feel about it?”

“I feel good. I mean, gosh, Johnny, it makes your head spin round. It’s good to be that close to someone.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah…” Stan nodded softly to himself as though he was turning over the experience, running the truth of it between his fingers. “Yeah… it makes you feel different.”

Monday was pretty much what most of our working days had become. A few hours servicing existing Plantasaurus customers and installing displays for new ones, the rest of the time back at the warehouse looking after our plants and doing whatever office work the business required. Including private houses, we had about fifty clients now. That was really only enough work to fill three and a half days a week but I spread it over five to create the illusion for Stan that Plantasaurus was a regular, full-time concern.

He was thriving in his new role of “businessman,” but he dealt with only one side of the operation-the making up of plant displays and the maintenance visits. What he wasn’t involved in was the constant juggling of finances, the balancing of outgoings and income, paying invoices for plants and soil and containers, issues of tax and insurance. He knew about these things because I talked to him about them, but that kind of information was too complex for him to hold in his head long enough for it to become real.