Empty Mile

by Matthew Stokoe

  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.

  He pushed himself off the Jeep and stuck his hand out.

  “Johnboy. Been a long time, dude.”

  “Gareth.”

  We shook hands and pretended to be old friends glad to see each other again. Gareth must have sensed my uncertainty, though, because when the reunion was done he cleared his throat and stuck his hands in his pockets.

  “This is an amazing coincidence, Johnny. When I heard you were coming back to town I hoped like hell we’d meet up, and now we have. I’ve been waiting for this a long time, man.”

  “Really?”

  “What happened was fucked up. Losing Marla was a blow, I can’t say it wasn’t, but after you left and she and I didn’t get magically back together I realized it was just one of those things. I felt like such a prick, you know? We were buddies. What happened with her shouldn’t have changed that.”

  “Well, it was a long time ago.”

  “Yeah, but I promised myself if I ever got the chance I was going to make it right.”

  Gareth took his hands out of his pockets and raised his shoulders.

  “I’d sure like to be friends again.”

  I had enough to deal with in Oakridge without subjecting myself to Gareth’s particular brand of friendship, but with him there in front of me, holding out an olive branch, I didn’t feel I had much of an option. And, of course, there was the fact that he’d saved my life hovering in the background.

  “Okay.”

  “Awesome, man. Awesome! This is like such a huge fucking weight off my mind.”

  We made nice for a bit longer, then I got my keys out and turned toward my pickup. Gareth was suddenly aghast.

  “Dude, what are you doing?”

  “Going home.”

  “I thought… Look, you don’t know anything about my life now. Why don’t you come out to my place? We don’t have the garage anymore. You’ll get a kick out of it, I promise.”

  “I don’t know…”

  “Johnboy, come on! Follow me
in your truck. An hour out of your day. Jesus, man, this is an event!”

  We left the garden center and turned right on the Loop, following the wide curve of the Oakridge basin northeast. The country along our route was mostly light forest, but occasionally there were driveways leading into the gardens of large homestead-style houses. I had the windows down and warm air that smelled of pine needles and hot tarmac blew across me. For a little way we ran parallel to a stretch of the Swallow River and the trees that lined the road broke its metal glint into a pattern of backlit leaves and smashed silver water.

  It was only when the scattered houses disappeared and the forest became denser that I began to suspect where we were going. I could have turned back, of course, I could have U-turned and raced for the safety of town. But I knew that sooner or later my time in Oakridge had to involve a return to this place, that it would be impossible for me to reconcile my past without doing so.

  And so I followed Gareth when he turned into an unpaved, deeply rutted series of cutbacks that had originally been gouged into the hillside by Conservation Corps workers back in the Depression. It took us five minutes of scrabbling up the steep grade before the track leveled out and gave on to a place every Oakridge local knew well enough, but which for me was burned like a brand across the soft tissue of memory. A place I had not been since I was eighteen.

  Tunney Lake was oval in shape, about four hundred yards by a hundred and fifty. It was fronted on its long side by a beach of coarse sand that was bordered to the right of where the trail came out by solid forest, and on the left by cleared land. There was no shoreline on the far side of the lake. Instead, a cliff of pockmarked rock rose fifty feet, straight from the water. Above this the trees continued, giving the lake the appearance of a giant soap dish chiseled into the side of the hill.

  On the beach a scatter of people sunbathed on towels or played in the dark water. For the most part, though, the place was deserted. Late morning on a weekday the locals were at work and the tourists, not having the incentive of knowing how beautiful the place was, were almost always turned back by the difficulty of the road.

  The track we were on ran almost the whole length of the beach and ended in a dirt parking lot which had a small set of public toilets in one corner. Beyond this there was a bungalow with a barn out back, and a collection of rundown weatherboard huts in a row along the last of the land by the beach. A wooden jetty cut into the water here. At the end of it a small rowboat lay upturned, the white paint of its hull flaking in the sun.

  Gareth and I parked in the lot and got out of our cars. He walked a few yards toward the bungalow then turned back to me with his arms spread.

  “Here it is, Johnny, the brave new venture.”

  Like the trail, the bungalow and its row of huts had been built by the Conservation Corps in the 1930s. They’d used them as their barracks while they cut hiking trails through much of the hill country around the Oakridge basin. When they were banged together their projected lifespan had probably been two or three years, but their frames and foundations had been well made and they’d ended up standing for more than seventy. Much of their cladding, though, was now not original and the roofs were patchworks of replaced tin.

  As long as I could remember the place had been run as a low-rent motel serving the few tourists who hung tough on the road or the occasional party of locals who got too drunk at their barbecues to make it back down the hill. It had had a string of different owners, but when I was last at the lake it had been one of Bill Prentice’s satellite concerns, a poor relation to his successful garden center.

  The front of the bungalow had a red and white neon Reception sign in the window and had been made over into an office that faced the lake. I couldn’t see clearly through the grimy net curtains but it didn’t look like anyone was in there waiting for business to show up.

  Gareth led me through the front door. In the office there was an unmanned white Formica desk littered with scraps of paper and empty coffee cups. Behind the desk a doorway gave access to the rest of the house. We went through it and along a corridor. The rooms we passed were shadowed and dim and there was a smell of old cooked grease and stale urine in the air.

  The hallway ended in a large combination kitchen/living room. Set into the rear wall of this was a wide door and a window which showed a short view of the barn and the forest beyond it. In the living area of the room the floor was covered with dusty, worn-through carpet on which a ragged lounge set had been untidily arranged. There was a brick fireplace that had old ashes in the grate and, beside it, a scarred card table with bits of some mechanism strewn across it.

  “As you can see, we’ve moved up in the world.”

  “You run the cabins?”

  As we were speaking a man in a wheelchair pushed open the back door and rolled into the room. He caught what we were saying and grunted, “When anyone can get up that fucking road.”

  I knew who he was but he was very much changed from the last time I’d seen him. Then, David, Gareth’s father, had been a physically tough man of medium height who, if you asked him, would tell you he worked damn hard three hundred and sixty days of the year. Now his legs were withered, his face was dried out and leathery, and he had some kind of scar running around the front of his neck. And he was in a wheelchair.

  He rolled over to me and looked hard into my face.

  “Which is hardly fucking ever. I remember you.” He stuck his hand out and we shook, then he rolled away, over to the card table, and called over his shoulder. “You know what this is? It’s supposed to be a fucking toaster. Only, the fucking Japs make ’em with parts that are so fucking weak, twelve months after you buy it it stops being a toaster and turns into a nice compact piece of scrap metal instead.”

  Gareth looked sadly across at him. “You need anything, Dad?”

  “Pair of legs and a lucky streak.”

  Gareth tried to smile but it didn’t work. He moved to the kitchen, took two beers out of the fridge and motioned me through the back door to a patch of grass behind the house. We sat in the sun on plastic garden chairs.

  “What happened to your father?”

  “This place. Five years ago he sold the garage and bought it figuring he’d finally found something that was going to bring in the bucks.”

  “Really?”

  “It sounds stupid now, but it wasn’t then. The only thing that stops this place being a goldmine is the road-too difficult for the tourists. But the way the deal was put to the old man, it sounded like the road was going to get fixed. Know who he bought it from?”

  “It belonged to Bill Prentice when I was here.”

  “Right. About a year before Dad got involved Prentice was made Resource and Development Manager for the council-gets to say what bridges need to be built, do we need another set of traffic lights, etcetera. And, of course, what roads need to be built. The council has to vote on it but he pulls a lot of weight, so if he’s behind something it’s got a good chance of going through. Anyhow, time passes and old Bill strikes a cash flow problem, decides to sell the cabins. His wife’s worth ten times what he is and could easily have fixed him up, but apparently she keeps her money very separate from his little enterprises. So Bill needs a buyer, but the place is a fucking dump and no one bites. Until Dad. And what made him stupider than everyone else? Bill let slip accidentally on purpose that the council was planning to build a proper road up here. Bingo. Tons of tourists, tons of money. Dad was hooked.”

  “If it was that certain, why didn’t Prentice hang on to it himself?”

  “Oh, he had an answer for that. Know what it was? The council couldn’t build the road while one of their councilors stood to benefit from it. Not bad, huh?”

  “But the road never happened.”

  “The council changed their minds, decided it wasn’t the right time for that kind of expenditure or some other bullshit. Bill swore blind he thought the road was a done deal. Said he was really sorry. But of course he didn’t want to buy the
place back and we were stuck with a property that couldn’t pay for itself.”

  “And the wheelchair?”

  “After a couple of years trying to keep it going Dad started to suffer from depression. They put him on some pills but they didn’t do any good. What he needed was a shitload of cash. Anyhow, along with the depression he couldn’t sleep. I didn’t know it at the time, but in some people who have bad depression taking sleeping pills can lead to a preoccupation with suicide. So the doctors wouldn’t give him anything. What he does, then, is call up some biker whose Harley he used to work on when he had the shop. Next thing you know he’s got a pile of benzos. Sure enough, a month or so later he jumped off the barn with a rope around his neck. He would have died for sure except the strut he tied it to was rotten and snapped when the rope maxed out. Dad hit the ground feet first and broke his back.”

  “Hence Bill Prentice’s tire today?”

  “Petty, I know, but sometimes I just can’t help myself.”

  The cabins were set a little further back from the lake than the bungalow and from where we sat we could see along the front of the row. They looked largely unoccupied, but as Gareth finished speaking two girls in their early twenties, wearing tight swimsuits and oversized sunglasses, walked down the path from the parking lot, unlocked the end cabin, and went inside. I raised my eyebrows at Gareth.

  “You do get some customers, then?”

  “They’re what you’d call an external source of income.”

  “Huh?”

  “They’re hookers, Johnboy. We have a mutually beneficial relationship. I set up their tricks and give them a place to stay, they give me thirty percent.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. Oakridge has changed while you’ve been gone. All those rich people up on the Slopes? They’re used to being able to buy whatever they want, and what some of them want to buy is sex. So far it’s meant the difference between this place going under and just scraping by.”