Matthew Stokoe - Empty Mile

For a long time I lay awake trying out imaginary conversations between the two of them. After that I started worrying about Stan. And then finally, finally I fell asleep.

Iwoke the next morning in despair. It seemed a certainty that all areas of my life were set to crash and burn. Stan was going to go mad, we were going to end up living someplace we didn’t want to be, Bill Prentice and Jeremy Tripp were going to maneuver us out of the warehouse, and Plantasaurus was going to die a premature death.

Stan was already in the kitchen reading a comic book and eating cereal when I came downstairs. He was wearing fresh clothes-dark blue jeans and a yellow polo shirt-and his hair was combed and freshly Brylcreemed. It didn’t look like he had any moths taped to himself under his shirt. He seemed serious but relaxed, as though sleep had eased the hold our current problems had on him.

“Know why I like comics, Johnny? They’re about a different way of living. The comic world isn’t the same as this one.”

“Oakridge ain’t Gotham City, that’s for sure.”

“I pretend that all the things in comics are really happening, it’s just that they’re in another dimension we can’t see.”

The depression I’d woken up with jumped another notch. Stan finished the last of his cereal. Outside, I heard the bleep of a small horn. Stan pushed himself up quickly and took his empty bowl to the sink.

“That’s Rosie. The hall’s open on weekends, we’re going to practice our dancing.”

“Did I just kind of forget this arrangement?”

“Johnny, you have Marla here. You’re going to be doing stuff with her.”

“All right, but tell me next time, okay?”

“Sure, Johnny. Can you pick me up from Rosie’s later? We’re going to go back there.”

“Yeah, okay.”

He winked and made pistols with his hands. “See ya later, pardner.”

He left the room and a moment later I heard Rosie’s Datsun pull away.

By the time Marla came down for breakfast I’d decided I was going to try Bill Prentice at his cabin again and, one way or another, get him to tell me what he had planned for the warehouse. If he was selling it to Jeremy Tripp I could brace myself for it, maybe try to figure out some alternative way to house the business. And if he wasn’t, I could at least cross something off my list of things to worry about.

It was a beautiful day, a few white clouds in a blue sky and a light breeze that up in the hills around the Oakridge basin made the air feel almost brisk. Marla and I drove to Bill Prentice’s cabin without speaking much. After the scene outside the Black Cat café she hadn’t wanted to put herself near him again and it had taken me half an hour of cajoling to get her to come along for support. She needn’t have worried, though, because when we got to the cabin there was no one home.

We parked and got out and stood in front of the place. There were no cars in sight and the cabin itself had the hollow look of a house people have gone away from. I knocked on the door but no one answered. I knocked again, listening as each roll of sound lengthened into emptiness.

These cabins were not hard to get into. Doors shifted in their jambs, windows in their frames, locks were not fitted with the precision of those in the cities. So, as I stood there, I was aware of an opportunity. I had seen Jeremy Tripp in the cabin. It was possible there was something inside that might help explain what he and Bill were doing together. I went back to the pickup and got a screwdriver.

The window at the side of the cabin, which had been so useful to me before, opened easily after a little levering. I hoisted Marla up and climbed in after her. For a moment we stood motionless inside the room, waiting and listening. But no dog came snarling from under a table, no knife-wielding hillbilly came thundering through a doorway, so we stepped away from the window and started to search the place.

In daylight the cabin looked untidy and dirty. It smelled of old food and unwashed clothes. The sink at the end of the main room was filled with dirty dishes and opened cans and most of the surfaces around it held items that should have been in the trash or stored elsewhere.

We checked the bedroom first. It held nothing but a rumpled bed, a lamp on a side table, and a pile of clothes on top of a low dresser. The small bathroom off it was just as barren-a towel, a piece of soap, a toothbrush and shaving gear. If there was anything to be found it looked like it was going to be back in the main room.

The first thing I checked in there was the large piece of paper I’d seen on my last visit to the cabin. It still lay on the coffee table and was indeed an architectural drawing, but it was for the garden center as it stood, not for any proposed hotel.

We spent the next twenty minutes hurriedly picking things up and putting them carefully back, listening all the time for the sound of an approaching car, but we found nothing that told me how Bill and Jeremy Tripp knew each other, or what plans Bill had, if any, for the warehouse.

We did, however, find something else.

A hip-high bookcase ran along a good part of the wall opposite the widow we’d entered through. It held paperback novels and a lot of coffee-table books about the scenery and the history of the area. It was also where Bill stored a small stack of DVDs. I rifled through them not expecting to find anything of interest, but near the top of the pile I came across one I’d seen before-at Patricia Prentice’s house when Stan and I had waited with her body for Bill and the police. A burned disk with a smiley face sticker on its upper surface.

I showed it to Marla and told her how it had looked like Patricia was watching it before she killed herself. If it had been a set of papers or a contract I might have stolen it to examine in the safety of my own house. But I couldn’t bring myself to take something so intimately connected with that day, something that Bill obviously felt strongly enough about to keep from the police and bring with him on his self-imposed exile in the mountains. Instead, Marla and I stood and watched it on the TV in the corner of the cabin.

When the disk started to play there were a few seconds of empty gray, then the screen cleared abruptly to show long grass, a shallow declivity, a surrounding wall of trees. Next to me Marla groaned and brought her hands to her mouth.

The scene stayed that way as I fast-forwarded through the first twenty minutes, unchanging except for the movement of a light breeze across the grass. Then three people walked into view. Marla, me, and Bill Prentice. The scene was shot from a foot or two above head height, as though the camera was in the branches of one of the surrounding trees, and the field of vision was narrow enough that the grassy hollow filled most of the frame.

After that there was ten minutes of action, ten minutes of Marla and me undressing, of the pale skin of my back and Marla’s rocking legs. Of Bill watching us.

The camera had recorded sound as well, but the breeze and its movement through leaves had muffled most of what there might have been to hear. Bill’s instruction to us to take our clothes off was barely audible and the few words Marla and I spoke were only a deeper muttering against the background rub of the air.

There was no camera wobble or change of angle, no panning or zooming. It seemed to me that the camera had been fixed in place rather than held by someone during the filming. And indeed, no one could have stood as close to us as the shot suggested without us spotting them.

It was sinister to see myself this way, to see how I looked when I had no idea I was being recorded. And it was strange, too, when the sex ended, to watch ourselves disappear simply by walking out of frame. First Bill, even before we had started to dress. And then Marla and me several minutes later, subdued, not speaking. I kept expecting the camera to swivel, to follow us, to supply some sort of cinematic closure, but it remained focused instead on the place where we had been and stayed that way as I fast-forwarded through the rest of the recording.