Empty Mile

by Matthew Stokoe

  Stan’s dance lesson was in a clapboard community hall that stood alongside a church in a residential street north of Back Town. The hall had a concrete area out front for parking that was about two-thirds full of small cars. Several old people were tottering across it toward a set of open double doors.

  Stan wanted me to come in and watch him but my visit to the lake had jarred loose too many memories and there was something else I wanted to do. He sulked a little until I promised I’d come back before he finished.

  The Channon was southeast back over the Swallow River and was about as far away from Old Town as you could get and still say you lived in Oakridge. It was an area of light forest that held a scatter of small, widely spaced houses. A place where the rents were low and people kept to themselves.

  Marla’s house was a two-bedroom wooden bungalow a few minutes drive into the area. It was screened from the road by a hedge and separated from its closest neighbor by twenty yards of trees. I drove slowly past it. A driveway ran down the left side of the house and from what I could see through the gap it made in the hedge, it didn’t look like anyone was home. There was no car out front and the glass of the windows was flat and dark.

  I parked the pickup a hundred yards further on and walked back along the road, my hand tight around a set of keys I carried in my pocket. These keys had been with me through all my time in London-two for my father’s house, one for the wooden bungalow I was now approaching.

  The front of the house had not changed. When Marla and I had found the place the window frames and the front door with its pebbled glass window had been white, but on our second day there we’d painted them red to mark the exuberance we felt at finally making our home together. I was twenty-one and Marla had just left Gareth for me-scratch one friend, gain one lover.

  I wasn’t sure if she still lived there. I’d written to her after I left Oakridge and she’d replied for a while, but her letters had been full of accusations and sadness and after a year she’d stopped writing back. Since then the only news I’d had of her had come in the rare letters or e-mails my father and I exchanged. Even the letter I’d sent telling her I was coming back to Oakridge had gone unanswered. But somehow it didn’t seem possible that I would not have known if she’d moved. It was reassuring that the window frames and the door were still red.

  I walked quietly down the side of the house, looked through what had been our bedroom window, and saw immediately that I’d been right-this was still Marla’s house. The room was still a bedroom, it even held the same bed and dresser. And on the dresser, a framed snapshot of Marla and me posing at some picnic spot on the Swallow River.

  I went back to the front of the house. I knocked on the door and waited a long time and knocked again but no one answered. I looked around me. None of the other houses in the street could see into Marla’s front yard. So I took her key out of my pocket and pushed it into the lock and turned it and opened the door. I stood on the threshold for a full minute, listening, then I stepped through and closed the door quietly behind me.

  Memory drove into me like a truck-the polished wooden floor of the hallway, the two bedrooms on the left, the living room on the right, kitchen and bathroom at the back. Even the smell of the place carried signatures of my time there-hot wood, air heated through glass. This house and the relationship that went with it had been one of the landmark abandonings of my exit from Oakridge.

  The past reached out to me from every room-from shelves I had assembled and screwed to a wall, from hooks I had put in the backs of doors, from a hinge I had clumsily fixed with a nail… The house was not a morgue for our time together, though. My ghost was there, but it was buried under eight years of her own living and showed through only in small patches, as though in painting on the layers of the present, time had missed a bit here and there.

  I tried to guess what her life had been like since I’d been gone. It was obvious she had not become wealthy or even comfortable-there was not the accumulation of new possessions that would indicate eight years of stable finances. Had she found another man? I looked for signs and to my relief found none. There was, however, one change to the house I could not decipher.

  We had always used the second bedroom as a storage room, had rarely ever gone into it. Now it was empty of household junk and held instead a double bed made up with dark blue sheets and a quilt. At first, I thought Marla must have taken a boarder, but there was too little in the room to point to regular occupancy. Apart from the bed there was only a small dresser and a wall mirror. But still, there was a fragrance of use here, a sensory mark that made me think the bed was sometimes used, that the mirror was occasionally looked into.

  I pulled back the covers of the bed. They had not been recently washed and the smell of sex rose from them. Dusty smears of dried semen stood out against the dark material. I opened the drawers of the dresser. The top one held a set of lacy black woman’s underwear and a bottle of personal lubricant. The other two were empty.

  I was closing the drawers when I heard a car pull into the yard out front. If it was Marla I didn’t want our first meeting to be like this. If it was anyone else I doubly didn’t want to be found in the house. I bolted from the room, down the short hall to the kitchen. There was a back door there that opened onto a small garden. I unlatched it and stood waiting, ready to run. The size of the house meant that to have any chance of escaping undetected I’d have to wait until whoever had just arrived opened the front door and stepped inside. The moment they did this I’d race down the side of the house and out onto the road. And hope that whoever it was didn’t look out of any windows while I was doing it.

  A minute passed and I didn’t hear steps on the porch or the scrape of a key in the lock. It occurred to me then that the driver of the car may well have just been using Marla’s driveway to make a turn.

  I pulled the back door shut, cursing myself for this insane act of unlawful entry. I left the kitchen and crept along the hall to the living room. There, mercifully, the curtains were half drawn and by staying close to the wall I was able to work my way around the room and look through the window at an angle that showed most of the area in front of the house without exposing myself.

  The noise I had heard had not been that of a turning car. Sitting smoking a cigarette in her olive Mercedes was the woman I had met at the nursery that morning-Patricia Prentice, the jittery, unhappy-looking wife of Stan’s boss. As I stood watching her, a second car pulled into the yard and parked.

  My mother died in a car wreck when I was sixteen and from then until I left Oakridge I’d never known my father to be with another woman. He had loved my mother in his distant, battened-down way and I always figured his sense of what was right had prevented him from looking for anyone else. But it seemed that eight more years of being without a woman had eroded this sense of rightness just a little, because the second car was his and he was standing now, holding Patricia, cupping her breast and running his other hand down her back to her buttocks.

  It was shocking to watch him touch another person so intimately. It was so far beyond my frame of reference for him that by witnessing it I felt I was stealing something from him, some charged emotional possession that should have been his alone to know about.

  I didn’t have long enough to really start feeling bad about it, though, because the kiss and the touching ended and Patricia and my father headed toward the porch. I crept along the hall to the kitchen and stood by the back door until I heard a key turn and footsteps cross the threshold. And then I ran, crouching low, out into the back garden, around the corner, and along the side of the house. I stopped for a moment at the edge of the front yard, scanning the place where the cars were parked, but it was clear, my father and Patricia were in the house and the door was closed behind them. I walked quickly out to the road and back along it to my truck.

  As I drove away I suffered the unsettling realization that the semen I had seen on the dark sheets of the bed in the spare room must have been my father’s
.

  The hall where Stan was dancing was a pretty basic affair-a stretch of bare floorboards, a curtainless stage at one end, a piano and several stacks of orange plastic chairs pushed into a corner. Almost all the people there appeared to be in their sixties or seventies and I couldn’t help wondering if this gathering was less a lesson than some sort of community program organized to allow pensioners to socialize.

  I stood in the doorway and watched the last dance of the afternoon. A portable stereo on top of the piano played an upbeat rhythm with a Latin feel and I guessed the class was practicing the cha-cha. For most of them, practicing was the operative word. They moved uncertainly through the steps and often stopped to confer with each other about what move came next. But Stan and his partner were in a different league entirely.

  He was dancing with a girl about his age wearing a faded pink shift and a pair of old running shoes. She had dark straight shoulder-length hair that looked dull and unwashed and a lot of the time she kept her eyes on the floor. They were the youngest there by far but they moved with confidence through the whole of the dance.

  This was something of Stan I had not seen before-my bouncing, stampeding brother was suddenly graceful. It seemed that in this controlled world of set moves he was able to feel sure of himself again, certain of his abilities. That he was able to claw back some of what he had lost at the lake.

  When the lesson was over Stan and I walked out to the parking lot. The girl he’d been dancing with had beaten us outside and was standing by an old orange Datsun. She had her keys in her hand but she hadn’t opened the car. Stan waved to her. The girl didn’t meet his eyes but she lifted her hand and smiled.

  As we pulled out onto the road Stan turned his head to keep her in sight. Then he straightened and let out a breath.

  “What do you think, Johnny?”

  “You were great. You’re far too good for the rest of them. I had no idea you could dance like that.”

  “What about Rosie?”

  “The girl you were with? She was good too.”

  “I like dancing with her.”

  “You dog!”

  Stan laughed, embarrassed but pleased at this man talk.

  “Have you asked her out yet?”

  “Nah…”

  “Are you going to?”

  “She might not want to.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Stan shrugged and looked out his window.

  “I don’t know…”

  “Looks like she likes you.”

  Stan turned back from the window and smiled quietly to himself. “Yeah.”

  We were silent for a while, then, as we drove through Old Town, Stan spoke again.

  “Johnny, did you think about my idea?”

  “The plant thing?”

  “Yeah. I thought of a name for it. Plantasaurus. What do you think?”

  “Like a dinosaur?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like it’s some kind of plant-eating dinosaur?”

  “You don’t get it, do you? Plantasaur-us. Planters are us. Planters are us! We could be the Godzilla of the plant industry.” He pointed out the window. “Look at all the stores. There are so many places that’d like plants, I bet. Don’t you think it’d work?”

  “Plenty of stores have plants already.”

  “But not proper ones. Not displayed all nice and looked after. People don’t know how to, Johnny. They don’t have time. We could deliver them, set them up in planters, and every week come around and water them and clean them and replace them when they needed it. Rich people might even want them in their houses.”

  “So, all we have do is buy a van, buy the planters, find a supplier to get the plants from, do some advertising so people will know about us, and find an office to work out of.”

  I’d run through this list as a joke to try to make him see things in a more practical light, but by the time I’d finished I felt bad for stamping on his idea so hard. To my surprise, though, he didn’t seem fazed.

  “Yeah, and we’ll need a place to store our plants. Like a warehouse or something.”

  “You’re serious about this?”

  “Serious as a heart attack. Don’t you think it’s a good idea?”

  “I think it’s a lot to think about. You can’t just start doing something like that.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’ve got to arrange things, put things in place. Think it all through.”

  “All you gotta do, Johnny, is just start doing it.”

  “Stan-”

  “What are we driving?”

  “A car.”

  “A pickup. So we don’t need a van. There’s a place in Burton we can buy planters from, and I can ask Bill where to buy plants. We don’t need an office, but we do have to have a place to keep the plants and Bill has that other warehouse he doesn’t use. He’d let us use it, I bet he would.”

  “He’d let us rent it, you mean.”

  Stan rolled his eyes like I was splitting hairs.

  “No, Stan, it’s important. All this stuff has to be paid for.

  It isn’t free, you know.”

  “I know that, Johnny. I’ve been saving all my pay, Dad told me I had to. I’ve got almost nine thousand dollars.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “That’s what I’ve got.”

  “I don’t know if it’d be enough to start a business, though.”

  “But you’ve got money too, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, a few grand.”

  “So we could put it together. We could be businessmen. Come on, Johnny. Please? I want to be someone people say hi to on the street. Please, Johnny. If I’m a businessman people won’t think I’m so dumb.”

  “You’re not dumb, don’t say that.”

  “Johnny!”

  “Okay, okay… Let me think about it for a while. It’s a good idea, but I need to think about it some more.”

  Stan smiled and punched the air. “Yes!”

  In bed that night I turned the problem over. It didn’t seem possible to me that a business could simply come into being the way Stan thought it could. Businesses, I assumed, needed detailed planning, market research, the raising of capital, prolonged evaluation of particular strategies…

  In a way, though, the mechanics of starting a business weren’t the issue. Stan believed that being a “businessman” would compensate for his reduced mental capacity, that it would place him on more equal footing with the rest of society. If that was so, if there was a chance that his life could be made better or happier this way, then however naïve the attempt might be, I owed it to him to do all I could to make it happen.

  It would consume our savings, and our lack of experience would probably doom the business from the start, but I had caused him to be as he was and this was my opportunity to make some small payment toward the debt of my past.

  Later that night while I was still awake my door opened and Stan poked his head into the room.

  “Did you think about it yet? I couldn’t get to sleep, I’m too excited. Did you think about Plantasaurus?”

  “Yeah, I thought about it. Count me in, dude.”

  Stan gasped. For a moment he was frozen, then he started running on the spot, shaking his hands in front of him.

  “You mean it, Johnny? Really? Really?”

  “But I don’t want to tell Dad about it just yet, okay? We have to be certain about things first. And before we can do anything we have to sort out that warehouse with Bill.”

  “You bet, Johnny. Oh boy, my head’s spinning round!”

  CHAPTER 5

  When I was twenty-two I was drinking too much and had already dipped my feet into the murky waters of entry-level crime, stealing cigarettes and liquor from the back rooms of stores at the edge of town and selling them to small-time hoods over in Burton.

  Eventually there was an incident, a line drawn across the flow of time beyond which, for a single clear moment, I could see the future. And what I sa
w was the stereotypical small-town boy gone bad-cars and booze and brawls and petty crimes… all of it leading straight to some bigger crime that got me caught and sent to jail.

  It was not a terrible thing that I did, not in the catalog of crimes available to human beings. But it was bad, and it was enough. I got drunk one night and stole a car from in front of someone’s house. I drove it out of town and into the forest and a mile down a fire trail I punctured its gas tank with a screwdriver and set it on fire. I watched it burn with my jaw set tight in a selfish fury at a world that had maneuvered me into hating myself so much.

  When the flames died I curled up beside the wreck and listened to it tick and crack until I fell asleep. I was drunk enough to feel, before I lost consciousness, a self-righteous satisfaction at the small revenge I had wrought. But it was different in the morning. The charred stink of the car’s remains woke me and I saw what I had done. What I had really done. The booze-fueled justice of my vandalism had been replaced while I slept with a reality that was mean and vicious and petty. I had stolen someone’s car. Chances were that it was the only one they owned, that it was their largest purchase, scrimped and saved for. Chances were that it was not insured and that it would take my unknown victim months to replace.

  When I told Marla what I was going to do, what I had to do to have any chance of finding some sort of pathway through life, she begged me not to go. She promised me everything she could think of-counseling, support, the dedication of her life to mine…

  But I knew none of it would be enough and within a month I was gone from Oakridge, leaving Marla with a broken heart and her dream of a safe and normal relationship in ruins.