Toward the end of our brief exchange Bill Prentice appeared. He was a fit-looking man around the same age as his wife with prematurely white hair and a square, ruddy face. He’d been a man around town ever since I was old enough to know what that meant and after he’d secured his place on the town council he’d made a name for himself as a proponent of growth through investment in infrastructure. Less publicly trumpeted were the rumors that he was a bit of a pervert.
He clapped Stan on the shoulder. “Stan the man! This the brother?”
Pat whispered “Jesus” just loud enough for him to hear.
Bill looked tiredly at his wife. “I didn’t know you were coming in.”
Pat held up the butt of her cigarette. “Don’t you have any fucking ashtrays in this place?”
Stan looked wide-eyed at me and tried to pull his head into his shoulders. Bill took the cigarette and put it out in an empty flowerpot, then he held his hand out and we shook. As he let go he ran his eyes over me and I had the uncomfortable feeling he was assessing my sexual potential. For a moment there was silence between us, then he thought of something to say.
“Stan’s doing very well here. We’re lucky to have him working with us.”
Pat’s lighter snapped as she lit another cigarette. Bill looked irritated and fanned the smoke away.
“Do you need to see me?” When she didn’t answer he stepped close to her and put his hand on her forearm. “I’m not busy.”
“Since when did that make a difference?” For a moment she looked emptily at him, then sighed and shook her head and said, “I’ll see you tonight.”
Bill watched her as she left the garden center, then turned and walked into the warehouse without saying anything else.
Stan led me out to the front steps. Pat had just turned onto the Oakridge Loop. She was in an olive Mercedes and she drove with her forearms against the steering wheel, leaning forward in her seat like she didn’t have the strength to hold herself upright. She was still smoking.
The day was warm and the display garden hummed in the sunshine. The mix of fragrances from the flowers made the air feel clean. Stan took a deep breath and let it out in a rush.
“Pat says plants know we’re here. They’ve done tests on them and everything. Like if you go to cut their leaves off they get scared, and they like it when you talk to them.”
I was about to leave when he grabbed my sleeve.
“Oh, Johnny, I forgot. I finish early on Tuesdays. Can you take me to my dance lesson?”
“Dance lesson?”
“Yeah, dance lesson. Be here at two o’clock, okay?”
I promised I’d be there, then walked around the corner of the building to the parking lot where the man who had once been my best friend waited for me.
CHAPTER 3
Gareth was a tall, slim guy with red-blond hair and pale skin that looked as though it had a layer of rust underneath trying to get to the surface. He had a habit of putting his hands on his hips and when he walked he strutted like a peacock.
We met in a bar when I was eighteen and he was a year older. He’d recently moved to Oakridge from Sacramento, the last in a string of relocations that had started when he was twelve and his mother ran off with another man. Gareth’s father was a car mechanic and had bought a small garage in town that the two of them ran by themselves.
At first it was fun hanging out with him-we were into cars, we liked the same music, we got drunk on beer. As I got to know him better, though, I found that there were other aspects of his personality which were not quite so carefree.
His mother’s abandonment and his father’s failing lifelong struggle for financial security had left Gareth with a lasting sense of insignificance. It wasn’t that he thought he was inferior to other people, because he certainly did not. He had simply come to believe that the universe had no interest in his existence. Because of this, he tended to treat people as mirrors in which to reassure himself of his own identity-a view of others which made friendship with him repetitive and draining. It also, on one occasion at least, translated into some pretty spectacular violence.
There was a small bar in Back Town where we used to play pool. I’d been in there one night, shooting pockets by myself, waiting for Gareth to turn up so we could head over to Burton and see a band. Two guys on vacation from somewhere on the coast thought it bad form that I was using a table to practice on when they wanted a real game. Things got heated and eventually I figured it was safer to surrender the table and catch up with Gareth at his place instead. But that wasn’t good enough for them and when I left the bar they followed.
My car was parked a few hundred yards along the street in a kind of no-man’s-land between Back Town and the Oakridge commercial precinct. It was darker here and the road was lined with scrub-filled lots that had been pegged out to service Back Town’s creeping expansion. The two guys figured it was a perfect place to hammer an uppity local.
They were big men and they were liquored up and after they’d knocked me down a few times the action and the booze combined to kick their poolroom anger into overdrive. One of them held me and the other took out a clasp knife and was preparing to cut his initials into my chest when a major disadvantage of that location, for them at least, made its presence known. The street was one of the ways you could get to the bar from Gareth’s place.
They didn’t realize he was there at first because he didn’t yell out or tell them to stop. He just walked up with a wrench and hit the guy with the knife hard enough across the side of the head to knock him out. The guy who was holding me threw me to one side and stepped forward. He was about the same height as Gareth but fifty pounds heavier. The extra muscle, though, didn’t make any difference. Gareth smashed the side of his face in with the wrench then kicked him in the ribs until something in the guy’s chest snapped.
That was the night I learned my friend had the potential to be a very dangerous man, and even though he’d saved my life I never felt entirely comfortable with him again-something, I guess, which spared me a little angst a couple of years later.
Gareth first saw Marla when she took her car into his father’s auto shop. She was an orphan who’d wound up in Oakridge at seventeen when her third set of foster parents took a job as caretakers in one of the camp grounds. After a childhood and adolescence spent in the harsh concrete of L.A., largely unloved and unhappy, Oakridge for Marla was a cool green refuge of the spirit, a haven from her past that she had no intention of ever leaving. So when her foster parents decided two years later to return to the city she stayed on alone, working as a waitress in a series of Oakridge’s cafés and restaurants. She’d been supporting herself like this for three years when she and Gareth began their relationship.
For Marla, he was a sanctuary from the emotional root-lessness of her earlier life. For Gareth, any attractive woman who agreed to live with him would have been useful, would have satisfied his need to believe that he meant something to the world. But he found more in Marla than that. Bizarrely, for someone so obsessed with himself, he found a woman to fall in love with.
They lived together in a small apartment over his father’s garage. When he and I were alone together he spoke about her constantly. It was a pairing which might have led to marriage, growing old together, children… except that I was in love with Marla too. And eventually she fell in love with me.
When it happened, when I took her away from him, it killed our friendship. He broke all contact with me, refused even to look in my direction when we passed one another on the street. This anger, this heartbroken enmity, had not lessened one degree by the time I left Oakridge a year later, so to find him now, waiting for me in the parking lot of the garden center, made me immediately wary.