Empty Mile

by Matthew Stokoe

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah…” Stan nodded softly to himself as though he was turning over the experience, running the truth of it between his fingers. “Yeah… it makes you feel different.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Monday was pretty much what most of our working days had become. A few hours servicing existing Plantasaurus customers and installing displays for new ones, the rest of the time back at the warehouse looking after our plants and doing whatever office work the business required. Including private houses, we had about fifty clients now. That was really only enough work to fill three and a half days a week but I spread it over five to create the illusion for Stan that Plantasaurus was a regular, full-time concern.

  He was thriving in his new role of “businessman,” but he dealt with only one side of the operation-the making up of plant displays and the maintenance visits. What he wasn’t involved in was the constant juggling of finances, the balancing of outgoings and income, paying invoices for plants and soil and containers, issues of tax and insurance. He knew about these things because I talked to him about them, but that kind of information was too complex for him to hold in his head long enough for it to become real.

  In a way this was a blessing because it prevented him from seeing the real direction the business was taking. I’d done some calculating and though we were just about covering costs now, we were still a long way from the total number of customers we needed for the business to be financially stable. This probably wasn’t unusual for a new company but the rate at which we were acquiring new clients was beginning to fall. If our rate of growth slowed further, or some catastrophe struck and we actually began to lose clients, long-term survival would not be possible-we couldn’t go on indefinitely running an enterprise that didn’t pay us a wage.

  It was late afternoon when Bill Prentice pulled up outside the warehouse. The day was warm and we had the doors open a little for air. When Stan saw the car he jumped up from the planter he’d been working on and called out happily, “Hey, Johnny, it’s Bill.”

  He went to the doors and yanked them apart. Bill stood in the opening, staring into the warehouse.

  Stan gave him a mock salute and said, “Hiya, Bill, long time no see.”

  For a moment Bill didn’t register him, his eyes were locked deeper inside the building, on me. I hadn’t told Stan about the confrontation Marla and I had had with him outside the Black Cat café and Stan frowned as he followed Bill’s gaze, trying to figure out what was going on. He turned back to Bill and waved a hand in front of his eyes.

  “Hey, Earth to Bill.”

  Bill Prentice looked at Stan then and nodded tiredly. “Hello, Stan.”

  If Stan had been a puppy he would have bounced. He grabbed Bill’s sleeve and pulled him over the threshold. “Look at the place, Bill. Check out all the plants we’ve got.”

  Bill pulled his arm away and looked grimly around the warehouse. I could see Stan was hurt but he tried to hide it and ran over to where we’d stacked the empty planters and the sacks of potting mix.

  “See how we have it organized? All neat. I told you I could do it.”

  Bill closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose as though he was fighting off a headache. “Yes, Stan. I see what you’ve done.”

  The overhead lighting in the warehouse brought out the hollows of his cheeks and the bags around his eyes. He’d lost weight and the linen jacket he wore was loose on him, but there was more to the way he looked than just the loss of a few pounds. He seemed somehow to have fallen in on himself, as though some dreadful cancer or parasite was eating him from the inside out.

  Stan cleared his throat and grinned nervously.

  “Seen any more bears, Bill?”

  But Bill was not there to reminisce. He pulled two sheets of folded paper from inside his jacket and held them out to me.

  “I want you to leave. This will cancel the lease agreement. You can just go, you won’t be liable for anything. You’ll get back all the rent you’ve paid.”

  “What!” Stan screwed his eyes up and shook his head rapidly from side to side. “What? This is our place! You said it was. You said-You said-Johnny, what is he saying?”

  I took the papers and skimmed them. Two copies of the same document, confirming that we agreed to cancel our lease on the warehouse. Bill had already signed in the space next to his name. While I was reading he turned to Stan and his face softened a little.

  “I’m sorry, Stan, but I need the warehouse back.”

  “You said we could use it.”

  “That was before Pat died.”

  “But we need it. I’m a businessman now!”

  Bill took a breath and let it out. “Stan, things go on in this world that are complicated, things you can’t understand.”

  Stan looked as though he’d been slapped. Bill saw it, started to speak again, then fell silent.

  Stan put his hands on his head and looked at me. He was lost. He’d thought of Bill as his friend and now this friend wanted to wipe out his business. I handed back the papers.

  “You want to sell the property, right? Someone made you an offer but they don’t want tenants.”

  “I want you out. That’s all.”

  “We have this place for a year with right of renewal for two more if we want it. We’re not leaving.”

  Stan stepped quickly to my side and held on to the sleeve of my shirt. He pointed toward the doorway and shouted, “This is our business! This is Plantasaurus! You better go.”

  Bill looked surprised at the outburst. For a moment he did nothing but blink, then his face flushed and his lips compressed. I didn’t understand what was happening at first, it was so beyond anything I might have expected, but as we stood there it became apparent he was struggling not to cry.

  It only lasted a moment, then it was over and his face was still again. His eyes, though, glistened under the light. When he spoke it was to Stan.

  “I just want to finish things. I want an end to it, that’s all. It’s not about you.”

  He turned and walked out to his car and drove away. Stan sat down on a sack of potting mix, put his hands on his knees, and started rocking back and forth.

  “My head feels like it’s going to burst open. Do you think that can happen, Johnny? Are there things that can make your head explode?”

  “No, but I know what you mean.”

  “But your brain’s strong, you can hold things in. My brain’s not like that. What if one day something happens and I just can’t stop it?”

  “Stan, your head’s not going to explode.”

  “I wish Bill hadn’t come around. Why is he so upset?”

  “It’s a huge shock losing your wife. Sometimes people flip out.”

  Stan took a matchbox out of his jeans pocket and pushed it half open. The moths inside moved sluggishly about. He breathed warm air on them then lifted the box and pressed the open part of it against his forehead. He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again he looked vaguely dissatisfied.

  We finished up at the warehouse and went home. Stan was worn out from the scene with Bill and soon after dinner he went upstairs to his room. I sat in the kitchen and wondered if rather than declining customer numbers, it was going to be me who destroyed Plantasaurus. Unless Bill actually did have some sound business reason for wanting us out of the warehouse, the explanation for his visit that afternoon had to be his strange hatred of me. And if that was so, it wasn’t a situation I could allow to continue. Plantasaurus was too important to Stan for me to be the cause of any threat to it.

  I brooded on the problem until the sky outside started to darken. Stan had told me that when Bill closed down the garden center after his wife’s death he had also moved out of the house he’d shared with her and relocated to a cabin in the mountains. At around 8:30 I went upstairs to Stan’s room and asked him if he knew where the cabin was. Fortunately, the garden center staff had had a team lunch there at the beginning of summer and Stan was able to give m
e directions. I told him I’d be back in a hour or two and headed off in the pickup to find out what, exactly, Bill’s problem with me was.

  The cabin was in the hills northeast of Oakridge. The country there was higher and craggier than that closer to the Oakridge basin and in daytime the views could be spectacular. A single thin lane of blacktop climbed through this area. Occasional trails twisted off it to small weekend homes built by those for whom the scenery nearer town was not quite overwhelming enough.

  It was night now, but the sky was clear and a three-quarter moon made driving easy enough. The start of the trail that led to Bill’s cabin was marked by a boulder that had been painted white. From there, Stan had said, it was a couple of hundred yards. Bill’s cabin was the only one on the trail.

  I made the turn and parked just past the white rock and killed the engine. I didn’t want Bill to hear me coming and do anything which might prevent my planned visit-lock his door against me, pretend he wasn’t home, arm himself with a weapon…

  I walked quietly along the trail practicing my opening speech. It was going to be difficult enough to get a foot in the door and I wanted to make the most of those first few seconds-Listen, Bill, we need to sit down and talk things over man to man…

  When I reached the cabin, though, it was immediately apparent I wasn’t going to get a chance to talk to him man to man or any other way. Parked carelessly in front of Bill’s SUV at the side of the cabin, Jeremy Tripp’s E-type Jaguar glimmered grayly in the moonlight. I could hear it’s engine ticking as it cooled.

  Jeremy Tripp and Bill Prentice. Click, click, click. A series of incidents from the recent past stepped brightly forward from the dark background of memory. Things which, at the time, had seemed uncertain or inexplicable now gathered meaning to themselves. The way Jeremy Tripp had looked at the garden center on his first visit to it, as though measuring it against some plan in his head. His crack about how the place would make a good site for a hotel. His bleached plants, dumped so publicly. And Bill’s weak attempt to move us out.

  Bill Prentice and Jeremy Tripp. What could it equal but one man wanting to sell and the other wanting to buy. And the buyer not wanting the inconvenience of tenants. That had to be what Jeremy Tripp’s dead plants were about-a first step toward wrecking our ability to afford the business and, by so doing, remove our need for the warehouse. Bill’s visit, with his absurdly unenforceable demand that we give up our tenancy, must have been the push from his side.

  And at the end of this freight train of conclusions there followed one other, the possibility that even Jeremy Tripp’s attacks on Marla-evicting her from her house, buying her as a prostitute-might be part of this same offensive. Was she perhaps just another way to strike at me, part of a war of attrition designed to force me to terminate Plantasaurus?

  The threat that Stan and I might lose our business seemed suddenly very real. Our lease couldn’t legally be terminated unless we failed to pay rent, but if two rich men wanted us out things could get very difficult indeed for our already fragile enterprise. And, the terrible thought occurred to me, they might not even have to get us out for Plantasaurus to suffer. If Tripp bought the place with us as sitting tenants, having a man who fucked Marla on his deck and shot rabbits with a longbow as our landlord would make running our business a living nightmare. What series of obstructions might he not place in our path?

  Though speaking with Bill was out of the question, I couldn’t leave without at least trying to learn something that might help me against these two men.

  The cabin didn’t reflect Bill’s wealth. It was similar to many scattered throughout the mountains-made of logs with a stone chimney at one end, one or two bedrooms and a living area, a rainwater tank, electricity from a generator twenty yards back in the woods. The front windows were heavily curtained but on the side of the cabin where Bill’s SUV was parked there was another window. It was small and uncovered and set at about shoulder height. I squeezed into the space between the cabin and the car and moved carefully along the wall until I reached the edge of the window. I crouched down, then slowly raised myself until I was able to see through the bottom corner of the glass.

  My line of sight was at an angle to the interior of the room but I could see enough. I was looking into the living area of the cabin. The room was spartan, the walls undecorated and the floor without covering. There was a wooden kitchen table and some chairs and, in front of them, a couch and a coffee table. Bill Prentice and Jeremy Tripp sat at opposite ends of the couch and it was plain they were not whiling away the minutes in idle conversation.

  A large sheet of paper was spread across the coffee table. It was a mottled white and had thin lines and rectangular shapes on it. I couldn’t see it clearly, but it looked like a set of architectural plans. If the two men had been examining it earlier, though, they weren’t now. Tripp had just said something and was waiting for a response, his face stony with anger. Bill was staring at the floor, immobile. After a moment, Tripp spoke again and when Bill still didn’t respond he made an abrupt, irritated movement and snatched a remote from the coffee table. He pointed it into a corner of the room I couldn’t see and a thin wash of light spread back over the bare floorboards. Tripp’s jaw muscles bunched as he watched whatever had just appeared on the screen. Bill slumped forward and covered his face with his hands.

  I stayed there for several seconds but the scene didn’t change and soon the fear of getting caught forced me away from the window and back along the trail to my truck.

  CHAPTER 19

  A week later, as Stan and I were finishing breakfast, a guy with a beard and sunglasses rang our doorbell. He held out an envelope and a paper on a clipboard for me to sign. He wore a windbreaker that was frayed around the cuffs and the car I could see behind him out on the road was an old sedan with a bad paint job. I figured he must be a local guy UPS outsourced to.

  When I signed for the envelope he nodded and said, “Served.”

  It dawned on me as he drove away that UPS probably didn’t outsource.

  I knew what the envelope held, I’d been expecting it. Plantasaurus hadn’t magically unleashed an avalanche of money in the last few weeks and the mortgage on the house remained unpaid. I held the result of that failure in my hand now-a notice of eviction and a statement about the right of the bank to undertake a mortgagee sale. We had two weeks to vacate.

  When things had started to look like they might reach this point I’d talked it over with Stan. He’d been more than horrified. In a way he was like a blind man, someone who could only survive the chaos of the world by sectioning off a small piece of it and progressively limiting its variables until it was ordered and repeatable enough to exist within. Losing the house would rob him of an environment that had not only been a safe and familiar refuge since childhood, but which was also a touchstone to that time before he changed, before the lack of oxygen took away part of him.

  I stayed on the doorstep after the courier had gone. Around me the sounds of morning-birdsong, a car starting, a child shouting somewhere further up the street-made the small front garden seem suddenly precious, a place whose true importance had only just been revealed. I stood and listened for a while, then I went inside and told Stan.

  He was very quiet for a long time afterwards and just looked around at the walls of the kitchen. Then he wrapped his arms around himself and folded forward a little.

  “I won’t be able to remember it all, Johnny. How can I store everything up inside me so it won’t get lost? There’s too much.”

  “You won’t forget anything.”

  “But some of the things I don’t even know I know. I can’t think of them right now but sometimes I look at something and then suddenly I remember what happened or what someone said or who was there. Like a flash. How can I do that for everything before we go?”

  It was technically possible for me to spare Stan this heartache, of course, all I had to do was pick up the phone and list Empty Mile with a realtor. If the land had ha
d no mystery about it, if I could have been certain that it was a plot of grass and trees and nothing more, Stan’s distress was such that I would have done so despite the promise I had made to my father. But I couldn’t believe Empty Mile was only what it appeared to be. My father simply wouldn’t have bought it if it was.

  It was in an attempt, then, to find some justification for subjecting Stan to the loss of the house, for my decision not to sell the land, that I went upstairs.

  My father’s room was a dark, strange place to me. As children Stan and I had not been allowed into it without permission. Ours had not been a family where we could wander in and bounce on the bed and kick off a Saturday morning horsing around with just-woken parents. This had always been their room, and after my mother died, his room. It was a dim place of adult secrets, of glimpsed-into cupboards that held things you never saw anywhere else-boxes for cuff links, a small stack of books that were never held in the bookcase downstairs, a rack of ties, shadowy ranks of clothes through wardrobe doors just ajar… Stan and I had spent a silent ten minutes there after my father disappeared and then avoided it ever since.

  There was a bed, an oak dresser with small belongings ordered neatly across its top, a looming wooden wardrobe with a mirror on its center panel, worn carpet, a bedside table. Everything old and dark. And against the foot of the bed the large wooden trunk he’d made as a schoolboy assignment in England and which he’d possessed longer than I’d been alive.

  This had been his private storage space. In here he kept his photographs, his papers, his letters, private copies of his real estate deals, bits and pieces of his early life in England. As I lifted the lid and smelled the cool waft of old paper and the dry tang of wood long closed up, I felt as though I was trespassing.

  And as I began searching through the trunk I found that I was reluctant to examine some of the things it contained, to have them cast their small illuminations across the shadowed terrain of his personality. A lifetime of being held at arm’s length had made it difficult for me to take more than the crippled intimacy I was used to from him. I left many of his possessions alone for this reasona pair of gold cuff links, a watch that did not work, a rugby trophy from his youth, a bag of old coins. But I spent an hour flicking through papers and documents and at the end of that time I’d found three things connected to Empty Mile.