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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.
    He pushed himself off the Jeep and stuck his hand out.
    “Johnboy. Been a long time, dude.”
    “Gareth.”
    We shook hands and