Bad Things (49 page)

staring unseeingly out into the yard. She had turned away, but

only by a few degrees, as if she’d done what she could before being

turned to stone by whatever force had gripped her. The veins were

standing out on the side of her temples. She swallowed every two

seconds, and kept blinking, as if fi ghting to keep this thing inside.

As I stared at her, bewildered, I realized she was listening to

the radio. The song got to the fi nal chorus and I knew I couldn’t be

found watching. I dragged my gaze back to the homework on the

table, and waited it out.

I kept my eyes down after it had fi nished, when my mother

walked out of the kitchen into the hallway for a few seconds. I heard

362 Michael Marshall

her cough several times, as if clearing her throat, and the sound of a

blouse sleeve wiped hard across her eyes.

Then she was back in the room, doing whatever she’d been doing

before. When I eventually did look up, it was as if none of it had ever

happened: though the next time our eyes met, what took place on

her face was the fl attest and emptiest thing I think I’ve ever seen. It

looked like a dead person’s smile.

I was young and so by the next day it was history. I never asked

her what that had been about, and I’m sure she wouldn’t have told

me—but I had something similar happen to me last year when I was

sitting alone in a bar in Portland, eight years after she’d died. A song

came on the bar’s jukebox, a song I’d listened to with Jenny Raines,

and I suddenly had an inkling of what my father might have been

weathering when our walks ended; what had accidentally caused a

distancing between him and me that culminated in me running with

bad kids, joining the army, and perhaps everything that happened in

my life after that.

I sensed a presence in the shadows of my life, and I believe a

song grabbed my mother by the heart that afternoon and yanked her

back to a period she never allowed herself to think about, to emotions

walled away but still alive—that it took her into that parking lot in

the back of all our heads and kicked her in the guts until she bled.

When it happened to me I did exactly what she had done. I

coughed, and wiped my eyes, and carried on.

I live in New York now, in a small apartment in a pocket of the East

Village that is sturdily resisting becoming fashionable, and remains

home to people who are old and do not speak English as a fi rst lan-

guage—and some of whom, I have heard it said, do not own a sin-

gle iPod. It has narrow streets and trees that are bare, now that it

is winter, and it feels like a place should. I have a job ten minutes’

walk away at a restaurant and bar called the Adriatico, a few turns off

B A D T H I N G S 363

MacDougal. I earn even less than I did in Marion Beach but at least I

am the offi cial pizza guy, so don’t let anyone tell you there’s no hope

of progress in the world.

When the bar shuts at the end of the night I hang out with the

other staff for a while, and then walk home through streets in which

there’s generally something still happening and our light and sound

and chatter make it impossible to believe that this area, like all others,

was once a wilderness.

I’ll sit out on the stoop and smoke a last cigarette, enjoying the

feeling of cold stone and the sound of distant traffi c, before fi nally

going upstairs.

To my continual surprise, I do not live here alone.

From what I hear, the restaurant in Marion Beach is very quiet now.

I know Ted toys with the idea of shutting down completely for the

off-season, but the cost of that pizza oven still pecks away at him, and

so he does not.

I returned to Oregon with Becki and Kyle to fi nd a state of crisis.

The night I wound up in Murdo Pond had seen the local police being

called out to the Pelican, to try to catch someone who was trying to

set fi re to it. On the back of this, Ted found out what Kyle had done,

and went biblical, forbidding him from seeing his daughter. I expected

Becki to put up a fi ght but it seemed she’d had enough of Kyle, too.

Turns out when Bill had left them at the Robertson house to follow

me into the woods that night, Kyle just ran away, abandoning her.

She threw him out, but Kyle didn’t get it. He didn’t seem to get

any of it. He didn’t understand that Becki was no longer his girl, that

he no longer had a job. He tried once more to get into the drug indus-

try. He quickly found his level, that of consumer.

The situation has since been resolved. The restaurant ticks over

during the quiet season, and Ted is letting Eduardo have his head

with a few novel items on the menu, as an experiment. Becki has a

364 Michael Marshall

new boyfriend and is now e-mailing me convincingly about going

back to college, this time to study for a business degree—so she can

come back and franchise the living daylights out of the Pelican.

Stranger things have happened.

I have also been in regular contact with Carol, by e-mail and once by

phone. She put Tyler on the line, at my request. We did not have a lot

to say to each other, but I tried, and will keep doing so. Whether I’ll

ever be a real father to him I have no idea. You do what you do and

wait and see how it turns out, and by then it’s all but done.

Carol still swears that the ser vice she paid Brooke Robertson

to broker wasn’t supposed to act against me, and I believe her. She

wanted no more than to make Jenny uncomfortable and sad, but as

soon as you unleash bad things into the world you lose control. They

have their own agendas and demands, bigger and more powerful

than any individual can comprehend. The last thing Carol wanted

was for harm to come to Scott, but he was the most valued thing in

the life of the man with whom another woman had committed her

punishable sin.

And so something happened, because.

We try to blame others for our misfortunes, point fi ngers, to seek

mitigation for our actions in the behavior, creed, or color of strangers,

but two plus two never equals fi ve. Sometimes it doesn’t even make

four. Often you’ve just got two of one thing, and two of another, and

they cannot be combined to create anything meaningful at all.

I cannot explain all of the things that happened while I was in

Black Ridge, but I know why they occurred. They happened because

of me.

Carol is lighter as a result of this calculation. I am heavier. That

is fair.

B A D T H I N G S 365

I understand some of the rest a little better now, too. Have parts of

a story, at least, put together from talking to Carol and one other

person.

I believe Brooke caused something to be set upon her father, af-

ter he confi ded in her that he was going to accede to Ellen’s wishes

and start a new family. I’m sure she told herself she was doing it to

preserve the legacy of her forefathers, and that Ellen’s demands were

forcing her hand, but I suspect the real reason was far more personal

than that. For I have also been told how the story about Brooke got

mangled in its way into school legend: that she came to this teacher

one night, brimful of adolescent love, and he had sex with her against

her will, and the secret and incompetent abortion that followed de-

stroyed any chance of her ever having children—that she might even

have died, were it not for the intervention of Marie Hayes.

Cory had been the Robertsons’ last chance of continuing their

bloodline stewardship of Black Ridge, but he was no longer capable of

that or anything else by the end of the night at Murdo Pond. Their

infl uence is over, unless what his sister did to herself at the end com-

pleted the fate begun by the deaths of their father and mother. Brooke

knew what she was doing, and her will was strong. What she felt for

Black Ridge was, I suspect, as close to love as she was capable of, and

so it is possible that enough blood has been spilled, for the time being,

to re-mark the forest’s tracks with the dead.

The Robertsons were a family, too, after all, and now they are

gone.

Every time I think of the name Murdo Pond now I kick myself for not

realizing what it had come from, but they had hidden the history well.

Soon after arriving in NYC I managed to fi nd a one-line reference

to a woman called Bridget Hayes, in Fort and Reznikoff’s
History of

Witchcraft in New England,
acquired through the Strand bookstore’s

rare-books ser vice. She was tried in Murraytown, Massachusetts, in

366 Michael Marshall

1693—and acquitted on the basis of character references from key

locals, including the Evans and Kelly clans. The Robertsons were not

cited in the court reports, though records demonstrate there was a

prominent family of that name in town at that time. They also show

these four families leaving together for the West, nearly two hundred

years later. This event is noted in the slim volume of Murraytown

history I subsequently found through AbeBooks, though the author

doesn’t speculate as to why three prosperous families should leave for

the unpredictable frontier, taking with them a lowly dairy farmer and

his red-haired wife, whose surname was also Hayes.

The book was creditably thorough in most other ways, including

specifying the number of children in each family. The Kellys had two

when they left Massachusetts. It is possible they had another en route,

I suppose, but unlikely it would have had time to grow to the size of

the third child I believe I glimpsed with them.

I think, or perhaps I hope, that was Scott.

I do not like to think of him being lonely in those woods, and

while Ellen could have made the pattern of branches and twigs on

the forest fl oor near the picnic area, I don’t think she made the marks

on the back of my motel-room wall. I like to believe that Scott’s spirit

was attempting to defl ect the forces that live in those woods, not onto

me, but
away:
making signs that I have come to realize bear a strong

resemblance to the arrangement of the streets in Black Ridge. I have

subsequently seen the pattern in other places, too, or something like

it, including in photographs I found online of cave paintings and cer-

emonial designs in Europe. I have wondered whether those prehis-

toric engravings were not maps after all, but attempts to ward off

creatures our ancestors could feel but not see.

Or perhaps, in some cases, to pay homage to them.

To tap into their power.

I’ve also wondered whether Brooke was telling the truth about

one thing, at least, and that it was not her who had called my motel

room during the night after I found the marks on the back of the

B A D T H I N G S 367

motel. When I think back now, it seems to me that the noise I heard

on the line could have been that of a child, trying to call out from a

very long distance.

Naturally I have no explanation for how that could be, but one

morning recently I took down the small pottery vase that had been

on my shelf and walked over to the East River Park. I waited until

there was no one in sight and then poured Scott’s remains into the

water. In a vase—or a lake—you can become trapped. From here I

hoped his ashes would make it to the sea.

Switch survived. He refused to accept his colleague’s portion of the

money I had promised them, though he did take twenty-fi ve.

Two weeks before I left Marion Beach I took a drive over to

Portland early one evening. Kyle was in the passenger seat. I had

tracked him down in Astoria, crashed out on the couch of one of

his remaining friends. In previous weeks he had made persistent at-

tempts to visit Becki, accosting her on the street, increasingly aggres-

sively. He simply wouldn’t leave her alone, seeming to believe that if

he could bend her to his will, then the rest of the world would fall

back into place, too.

So I made a deal with him. I told him that he was going to come

with me to Portland. There I would straighten out his problems, us-

ing more of my money if necessary, after which I would drive him to

the airport and pay for a ticket to anywhere in the USA. In return,

he’d leave Ted’s daughter the fuck alone.

He perched on the couch and twitched and sniffed and eventually

agreed, perhaps sensing that the deal I was offering was the best the

world had left to give.

When we got to Portland I left him in a bar sucking back Bacardi

and walked a couple of blocks to where I’d agreed to meet representa-

tives of the gang from whom he’d originally bought his drugs—guys

I’d made contact with through a number Switch had given me. There

368 Michael Marshall

were three men waiting. I explained I would like them to no longer

pose a threat to Ted, his business, or his daughter, and outlined the

nature of the deal I was proposing.

They stepped back to discuss it, and then the shortest of them—it

generally is, for some reason—came forward again.