Bad Things

by Michael Marshall

“Yes,” Cory said. “More extensive, as a matter of fact—quite a substantial addition in the back.”

  “Wonderful. Could I have a look?”

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” he said smoothly. “There’s a tenant in that part of the property at the moment. She’s not home right now, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable invading her privacy.”

  “Of course,” I said. “So, you rent it out?”

  “Something like that. But she’ll be leaving soon.”

  “I’m surprised,” I said. “If I was lucky enough to live here, I think it would take a great deal to make me leave.”

  Cory merely smiled.

  “You’ve been very kind,” I said as he led me back down the main staircase.

  “My pleasure. When one is fortunate in life, it behooves one to share it around a little.”

  “A generous attitude,” I said, though evidently it did not extend to his father’s second wife.

  When we reached the lower hallway my eye was caught once again by the poem on the wall. Cory saw me looking, and read the lines aloud.

  “ ‘The ports ye shall not enter/The roads ye shall not tread/Go, make them with your living/And mark them with your dead.’ ”

  “ ‘The White Man’s Burden,’ ” I said.

  “Very good. My grandfather was a fan.”

  “Of Rudyard Kipling, or imperialism in general?”

  “Kipling.” He smiled thinly. “But when his father arrived here with a wife and four young children, you’d better believe the locals needed a little civilizing.”

  He stood out on the porch as I walked back down the drive. When I glanced back, however, I saw his eyes were not on me, but the other house.

  I thought I saw the curtains in one of the upper windows move, but the sky was full of scudding clouds and it could have been a reflection of them instead.

  I got back into my car unsure of what I had learned. Unsure, too, of what I thought of Cory Robertson. Possessed as he was of the bland presumption that comes from local note and wealth, but also its genteel politeness, it was hard to imagine him making someone feel they were in danger. Except, perhaps, when he had been speaking of his tenant’s anticipated departure, or when intoning a poem which— though well meant at the time, and born of a blithe paternalism that was not quite the same as racism—could serve as a defense of the territorial rights of the self-defined “civilized” over all others.

  I wondered, too, whether Cory realized how one of the lines could apply to his own mother, who had left this world alone, tangled in wreckage in a gulley below one of the roads that men like his grandfather and great-grandfather had forged through these mountains.

  Mark them with your dead.

  Something told me that he did.

  CHAPTER 15

  On the way back to the motel I tried calling Ellen Robertson, but got no reply. At the motel I packed, which took less than two minutes. If I drove hard down to Yakima, I might just be able to get to the Pelican in time for the evening service, but I’d be pushing it, and it anyhow seemed wrong not to at least try to see Carol while I was up here, in which case I’d get back to Marion Beach too late—and I needed to warn the restaurant.

  It made sense to call my ex-wife first. The prospect made me feel nervous and tired. It had been five months since we’d last spoken. A short and polite exchange of news, of which I had little and she the same, or none she wanted to share. Conversing with people you used to love is very draining on your sense of reality. The gulf between now and then is too deep and bizarre to ignore, and there’s little more strange than someone who used to be the opposite of a stranger. Nonetheless I dialed Carol’s cell phone number, rehearsing the breezy tone I’d use to invite myself around for coffee.

  “Hey, it’s me,” I said, when she picked up. It didn’t sound the way it had in my head.

  There was a pause, and so I added, “John.”

  “Oh, hi,” she said, with bland warmth, as if it had been her, rather than Ellen, to whom I’d pretended to be a bookstore manager announcing the arrival of a not-much-anticipated volume. It was precisely this tone of voice, and its payload of considered maturity, that prevented me from dialing her number more often.

  “Hi to you, too. So, how are things?”

  She was fine. Tyler was evidently fine, too. Carol’s brother was not quite fine, however, having slipped on a wet supermarket floor and hurt his ankle. The play-by-play on Greg’s vacillation over whether to sue the market soon ballooned to occupy more airtime than had been dedicated to my ex-wife and remaining child. I took the phone outside and smoked a cigarette while I withstood it. Is there anything in the world more dull than the lives of the relatives of an ex-partner? It’s like being proudly shown a factory-condition Betamax VCR and expected to admire the detailing.

  “The thing is,” I said, when the topic eventually ran out of steam, “I’m in the area. I wondered whether—”

  “You’re here?”

  “Yes. Well, not in Renton. I’m in Black Ridge.”

  There was a pause. “What are you doing there?”

  “It’s been a while. I wanted to see the house.”

  “You went to the house?”

  “Yes. There’s no one living there at the moment.”

  “But why did you go there?”

  “Because it was time.” I was feeling defensive by now, also annoyed, and my voice had become clipped. “I’m going back south later. But given that I am here, I thought I’d come over and see you.”

  “I’m on my way to work.”

  “Okay, so this afternoon. I can fly out of Sea-Tac and—”

  “This afternoon’s not good, either.”

  “Carol, I have a right to see my son.”

  “Oh, really? After three years?”

  “After three, ten, or twenty years. What’s the problem? Is there something you’re not telling me?”

  “We’re divorced, John. I don’t have to tell you anything. I don’t have to see you and I don’t want to. Just go back to Oregon. And stay there.”

  For a moment I didn’t know what to say, and then I did. “Fuck you, Carol.”

  I don’t think she was even on the line anymore.

  I stood, my hand squeezing the phone so hard it hurt, for several minutes after she’d cut the connection. Discourse between the married doesn’t always bear scrutiny in matters of reason or politeness. Even less so that of the no-longer-married—who will casually say things that would lead to a knife fight in any other situation. This had never been the case between Carol and me, however. I tried to work out if it would bother me if she had a new man in her life, and couldn’t decide. At some level, maybe, but I’m a big boy and could have taken the information. She should have known that.

  I called her back, but there was no reply. There didn’t seem any point leaving a message.

  I was putting my bag in the back of the car when my phone buzzed.

  “You were here,” a woman said.

  “Yes,” I said. “And so were you, Ellen. Which wasn’t what Cory told me, when I asked if I could have a look in your house.”

  “But why were you were here?”

  I was done being talked to this way by women, for one morning at least. “Because someone left a message on my phone last night,” I snapped, “after you went nuts and ran off. It was a woman’s voice but calling from the Robertson house. It said that I shouldn’t trust you. Because you lie.”

  There was silence. I’d already put this down to her realizing she’d been caught out, before I realized I could hear the sound of quiet, weary crying. “Ellen,” I said. “I’m going home now.”

  I heard nothing but more of the same sound. I looked at my watch.

  Coming up on eleven. It was already going to be touch and go to make it back for the evening shift, but I don’t think it was that which changed my mind. I believe two conversations melded in my head—the debacle with Carol, and the present one—and I felt I had to do something about at
least one of them. A woman’s anger or distress is different from a man’s. There is something more critical about it, as if it relates to an underlying condition of the natural world. Depending on the kind of male you are, you will either feel compelled to resolve the situation, or become excited (in a corner of your soul you don’t want to know how to find) at the idea of making it interestingly worse.

  “Come meet me,” I said. “Let’s talk. Doesn’t have to be in Black Ridge. I’ve got a car and a map.”

  There was silence for a moment. “Can I trust you?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  I put my bag back in the room and stopped by the motel office to tell them I’d be staying the extra night after all. Marie wasn’t there, but a young girl with long brown hair was standing behind the desk looking over a list of chores, as if wondering what language it was written in.

  “Hey,” I said.

  She looked up, slowly. Blinked at me. She seemed to be about sixteen, seventeen, and very pretty. From the housecoat she was wearing I guessed she was the maid. She looked like she’d been awake for about a week. Not partying, just awake.

  “Hello?” she said.

  I told her what I wanted to do but she just didn’t really seem to get it. It didn’t appear to be a matter of lack of intelligence so much as the information just not getting through. In the end I leaned over the counter, grabbed a piece of paper, and wrote the information there in big letters. The girl seemed not to take offense. I’m not sure she even noticed. I said good-bye and she watched me back out of the office like someone observing clouds passing overhead.

  Outside I called my third woman of the morning. I was so focused on making sure Becki was okay with covering for an extra night that it wasn’t until that was done that I noticed she was sounding distracted.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Well, sort of.”

  “Don’t tell me Kyle’s done something dumb again.”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted, after a beat. “But he’s acting weird, and kinda shouty, and . . . shit, this really isn’t your problem, Walking Dude. You okay up there? Where the hell are you at anyway?”

  “Washington. A place called Black Ridge.”

  “And it’s going okay, this family thing?”

  “Fine,” I said. “Look, I’ll be back tomorrow night, okay?”

  “Be good if you were,” she said, and was gone.

  I walked to the car, reflecting that—for a man who’d spent every night of the last three years alone—I suddenly had a whole lot of women in my life.

  I had an hour and a half to kill before meeting Ellen, and I used the time to grab something to eat in the Write Sisters. Once you ignored the fact the food was good for you, it didn’t taste too bad. Afterward I decided to order coffee, experiencing some difficulty in attracting the blue-haired server’s attention. In the end I had to stand up and go over to the counter, and she operated the coffee machine as if for the first time.

  “Are you okay?” I asked eventually.

  She shrugged. “Bit of tummy pain, that’s all.”

  “Seen a doctor?”

  “They’ll just tell me to take a pill.”

  “It’s how they roll,” I said, and got a very small smile.

  As I drank the eventual result of her labors I leafed through a local chapbook on the town. It had been produced a decade back, and the only business I recognized was Marie’s Resort. The others had evidently all closed down.

  Black Ridge had a background common to many settlements in the area, and it didn’t take long to absorb. Originally a site of intermittent use to a variety of Salish-speaking local peoples, it was lost to the white man after a tribal member with no authority was talked into putting his mark on a treaty document. After that, any Indian found on land to which a white person held title was deemed to be squatting, and could legally be moved on.

  And so they were. Settlement came in fits and starts, until in 1872 one Henry Robertson subdivided his homestead into lots, laid out the streets, and registered the town, together with John Evans, Nikolas Golson, Joshua Kelly, and Daniel Hayes, a dairy farmer—the families having arrived from Massachusetts either together, or more or less at the same time. The Kelly family disappeared back east again within months, and Golson was run out of town a year later for petty theft, but the rest of the settlers prospered. Timber gradually became the main focus of business and the place was prosperous and confident enough to be incorporated in 1903, at which point the couple of blocks where I was sitting constituted the center of town, a collection of short, angled streets that looked like they had been drawn in the sand with a stick.

  I glanced through the window when I reached that point in the narrative, and found it hard to imagine the eleven saloons that had plied noisy and sometimes dangerous business along either side of those muddy tracks, or the mustachioed men and boot-faced women who had frequented them. Either that vitality had seeped into the ground like spilled blood or their spirits had blown away into the forest long ago.

  For a time men and women from local tribes had played a part in the town’s history, predominantly helpful, occasionally losing it and whacking some especially annoying white boy, but eventually they faded from the story along with, frankly, pretty much everything else of interest. Black Ridge now felt tired, starved of power and direction, as if its batteries were giving out. The only thing that struck me was why Henry Robertson had chosen to build his house a substantial walk away from the fledgling town, in what remained forest to this day, rather than slap in the middle, as founding fathers (like Henry Yesler, over in Seattle) were prone to do. The Evans house still stood, having been turned into the town’s library during the 1970s. The site of the original Hayes property was also nearby, now under the bank in whose parking lot I’d acquired a coffee from early that morning. The Kelly family, despite apparently not even lasting six months in the area, got the main street named after them. So why had Henry Robertson chosen to build four miles away? It didn’t seem likely that I’d ever know, or that it could matter much.

  I added a copy of the book to my tab, paid, and left. The waitress was looking more off-color, if anything, and I hoped she hadn’t taken her lunch at work, and if so, that I hadn’t eaten what she had.

  The place Ellen specified was a picnic spot between Cle Elum and Sheffer. Eight tables spread among the trees, with a graveled lot in which one vehicle was already parked. A red sports car. I hoped it was Ellen’s, or—given her nervousness about being observed—it seemed unlikely she’d stay when she arrived. When I got out I saw a figure standing at the edge of the trees, a few yards past the farthest table. I realized Ellen wouldn’t know what car I drove, or be able to see me clearly, and so I walked into the area slowly.

  “Ellen?”

  There was no response.

  I took a few more steps and realized she must have been deeper into the trees than I’d at first thought, or had then moved, as what I had assumed was her turned out to be just another tree.

  “Ellen—it’s John Henderson.”

  She must be able to see me, wherever she was standing, and so I stopped moving and waited. After about a minute she came walking out of the woods, from more or less where I’d expected. She looked tired and pale.

  “Are you alone?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Sometimes people aren’t.”

  “Well, I am,” I said, holding out my arms and turning slowly to encompass the world in general. “Even the little voices have stopped talking to me.”

  She bit her lip, and finally smiled.

  CHAPTER 16

  We sat on opposite sides of a table. She was wearing jeans and a thick maroon sweater, her hair and makeup looked less polished, and I revised her age down a couple of years as a result.

  “So where are you really from?” I asked.

  “I told you already.”

  “You’re not from Boston,” I said. “So let’
s use the next two minutes as a test. Somebody’s tried to convince me you’re untrustworthy. I’d like to believe that isn’t true. So. Where are you from?”

  “How did you know?”

  “Got a good ear. Your accent is excellent but the more I hear it, the more I realize the vowels are too rounded sometimes, and once in a while your word choice is off. No one around here is going to know the difference but I’ve spent time talking to someone who really does come from Boston.”

  “And you’re an expert?”

  I waited.

  “Romania,” she said defiantly.

  “But you’ve been here a long time?”

  “Eight years. I was in England for a while before that, and France, and now I live here. I, too, have a good ear. I wanted a good job in America. So I took the trouble to work on my accent. My French isn’t so bad, either.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-four. And that’s not a polite question in any language.”

  I was surprised into a smile. “Okay,” I said. “Look. You’ve been honest, and I’ll be the same. I’m sorry if you’re having a hard time but this is the last conversation we’re going to have unless you give me reason to believe you have information relating to the death of my son.”

  “What about you?” she said. “Where are you really from?”

  “Newport Beach,” I said, lighting a cigarette. “California.”

  “I don’t mean that.” She took one from my pack without asking, and picked my lighter off the table. “It said in the newspaper you were a lawyer.”

  “Yes. I was.”

  “But not always, I don’t think.”

  “And now you’re the expert?”

  She didn’t smile. Just waited, much as I had done, looking me directly in the eye. She didn’t seem a whole lot like the woman I’d met in the Mountain View Tavern, and I remembered what Kristina had said.

  “I was in the armed forces. Later, I was a lawyer. I did some other things in between.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “Like what? Listening closely to the way people spoke, and what they said?”