Empty Mile

by Matthew Stokoe

  “It’s weird, Johnny. I felt so much… space around everything when I came back alive and I felt it all the time afterwards too. But now sometimes I don’t feel anything except just what I can see.”

  “But that’s how everyone feels, Stan. That’s how I feel.”

  “I know, Johnny. I know.”

  Stan looked so bereft as he said this that the giant corkscrew of guilt on which it seemed I would be forever impaled made one more wrenching turn in my guts. I had made it plain to him that I thought his ideas of power, of something beyond the world we could see, were nonsense. I suppose some part of me had hoped that this reaction would school him toward a more socially palatable interpretation of the world around him. But I realized now that rather than guiding him toward some replica of normality, my selfishness of spirit had begun to rob him of something he found beautiful about life.

  “Have you ever been swimming again?”

  “No.”

  He put his head down and we started toward the trees.

  It was shadowy in the forest and in the denser, darker areas the undergrowth was finely beaded with dew. If I had brought Stan on this walk earlier, before Plantasaurus and Jeremy Tripp, before the loss of my father and our house, I knew he would have stampeded through the damp clumps of ferns, barrel-rolled across open patches of grass, pretended he was an explorer. That day, though, he walked somberly beside me. He chatted responsively enough, but his usual bouncing energy was just not there.

  I remembered the way easily enough and after a couple of minutes we found the rock with red paint and the dip in the ground behind it where two months ago I had had sex with Marla in front of another man, while somewhere close by the mechanism of a video camera had whirred silently away, recording everything we did.

  Stan made a small sound of delight as we skirted the rock and stepped into the hidden depression behind it. After his staid performance through the forest it was heartening to see there was still enough wonder left in him to enjoy the discovery of a secret place. He settled in the middle of the bowl. I left him pulling things to eat out of the backpack we’d brought with us and went to see what evidence I could find.

  It wasn’t hard to figure out where the camera had been placed. The position in which Marla and I had lain that day was clear in my mind. Matching it to the image we’d watched on the TV in Bill’s cabin indicated a group of trees at one end of the curving screen of foliage. About seven or eight feet off the ground the trees threw out lightly leaved branches that did little to obscure the trunks from which they grew. I found what I wanted almost as soon as I started looking for it.

  A metal, L-shaped bracket had been fixed to the side of one of the trees immediately below the bough line. The horizontal part of it stuck out about four inches and had three holes drilled along its length. The screws that held the bracket in place, through another three holes in the vertical section, looked like they’d been hammered into the tree. There were pieces of brown packing tape stuck to the bracket and it was a fair guess that the camera had been taped into place.

  I went back to where Stan had set out our food, got the Swiss Army knife that was part of our picnic kit, and spent five minutes struggling with the battered screws until I had the bracket loose. Stan came over to watch me work but as he knew nothing of the thing’s significance he lost interest after I explained I had no idea why it was there but that I didn’t want it to damage the tree.

  When I had it free I turned it in my hand but there wasn’t much to be learned from it. It was steel. Its edges were smoothly ground and the holes for the screws were countersunk. It was well made and nicely finished but beyond that it was just a bracket. I put it in my jacket pocket and went to sit with Stan. We ate peanut butter sandwiches and potato chips. We told jokes and for a couple of brief minutes talked about my father.

  Later, when we were done, we walked back out into the sunshine of the lake. My mission to the forest was over and I wanted to get the visit to Burton and the mineral laboratory out of the way and still have some of the day left. But as we approached the pickup in the parking lot near the cabins the door to the bungalow/office opened and Gareth trotted over to us.

  “Dude. Hey, Stan. I saw the truck but I didn’t know where you went. Come in the house and have a beer. Coke for you, buddy.” He winked and cocked his finger at Stan.

  “We’ve got things to do in Burton.”

  “Fuck that. Come inside. Ten minutes. We gotta catch up, man.”

  “I really have to get-”

  “Haven’t I kept my word about the Marla thing? I’m trying, dude. Come on. We’ll sit, we’ll chat, and then you’ll go to Burton.”

  Stan tugged my sleeve. “I’m thirsty, Johnny, I need a Coke.”

  After that there didn’t seem much chance of getting out of it without a scene and the three of us went into the office and on through to the living area at the back of the house. Gareth got a Coke and a couple of beers out of the fridge. As he handed Stan his drink he gestured to the open back door.

  “Dad’s working in the barn, Stan. You can go out and watch if you want.”

  “Cool.”

  Stan went outside and Gareth and I sat on the ratty lounge furniture. The room was dim and the light that came in through the doorway flared against the frame. Through it I could see some of the garden, and beyond that the barn with its doors swung wide and Gareth’s father in his wheelchair at the bench inside, working on something with a machine that made a high whining noise. And Stan standing beside him, yakking away.

  Gareth slugged his beer and burped. “I got rid of the hookers.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah, I’m hearing noises that the council are thinking about the road again. Couple of whores on the premises isn’t a good look. Man, if that road gets built…” Gareth shook his head in wonder.

  I couldn’t help spoiling his mood. “How’s Vivian?”

  “Fucked. She’s working for that prick, fucking him… And she’s ended it. No more trips to the Slopes, no more visits to the big house. Old Gareth didn’t have the money to make the grade.”

  I could see he was gearing up for a full-blown purge, so I cut him off quickly. “Marla took me to an Elephant Society meeting.”

  Gareth looked nonplussed for a moment, then his eyes shifted a little. “Oh yeah?”

  “You’ve heard of it, right?”

  “You know I have, Johnny. I told you I used to go with your dad sometimes. Are you trying to catch me out?”

  “A guy there said you and my father had the same interests.”

  “That’s what the Society’s for, isn’t it? But I stopped going months ago.”

  “Anything particular you two were interested in?”

  “Lots of things to be interested in, Johnboy. Lots and lots.” He looked levelly at me for a long moment then his face brightened like he’d just remembered something. “Oh, I spoke to the bank and with the equity in this place I couldn’t buy all of that land off you, but I can raise enough for half of it. No problem. I mean, that would solve everything for you, wouldn’t it? You don’t have to give up the whole thing but you get a bunch of dough to keep you going.”

  “I’ve told you twice I’m not selling. Besides, I’m living out there now.”

  “At Empty Mile? Really?”

  “The bank sold the house.”

  “What are you doing with the land?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What are you doing with it?”

  Gareth was leaning forward in his chair and the bottle in his hand had tilted so that beer was spilling onto the floor by his foot. I pointed to it and he set the bottle down in the puddle and pressed his hands hard together and took a breath.

  “Promise me that if you ever want to sell some of it you’ll come to me first.”

  I made a move to stand up but Gareth held on to my arm.

  “Hey, did I sound like a fucking idiot or something? Sorry, man. It just seems like such a good idea to me, tha
t’s all.”

  He let go of me and I yelled through the doorway for Stan. Gareth said goodbye as we left but he didn’t come out of the house to see us off.

  I made it down Lake Trail without incident and then turned left along the Loop to drop Stan off at the warehouse. He seemed chirpy after messing around in the barn and I asked him about his time with David.

  “It’s really neat how he makes stuff. He let me drill a hole. Here, look. He let me keep this one.”

  Stan dug inside his jacket and held something out so I could see it. I pulled immediately to the side of the road, a hot flush of triumph rising through me.

  “Let me see that.”

  It was a steel bracket with three countersunk holes in each arm. I’d put the bracket I found that morning in the glove compartment. I took it out now and held it next to the one Stan had given me. Except for Stan’s off-center drilling the two were identical.

  “Wow, Johnny, they’re the same. Why would David put one on a tree?”

  “Maybe he was just testing it out. Can I keep this for a while?”

  I dropped Stan at the warehouse then carried on to Burton. It was a nice day for the drive, but I didn’t pay much attention to the scenery. I was too busy thinking about the brackets.

  The Minco building in Burton had a utilitarian, ’60s feel to it-all sharp angles, blank unadorned walls, and windows that were simply inset sheets of glass. The floor of the reception area was covered with gray linoleum that was mottled with shoe scuffings and pitted here and there where something too heavy had pressed against it for too long. There was a counter across one end and behind it a walk space and then a wall with a large shuttered hatch in the middle and a flat wooden door at one end. There was no one behind the counter and the room felt abandoned, as though I had turned up in the middle of a fire drill.

  A button on the counter had a laminated plaque next to it that said customers should ring for assistance. I pressed it and somewhere way back behind the wall I heard a faint buzzing. A minute later a fat woman with oversize glasses opened the door and shuffled sideways along her side of the counter. I told her I had something to collect from Reginald Singh. She scribbled my name in pencil on a small pad and then shuffled back through the door.

  After a while the door opened again and Reginald Singh came out. He was a slender Fijian Indian. He wore a white lab coat and spoke in a voice that sounded as though he’d worked hard to eradicate his accent. He placed a small clear plastic vial on the counter in front of me. It contained a thin wafer of gold-colored metal that had been bent into a half-circle to fit in the narrow tube.

  “John Richardson?”

  I nodded and showed him my driver’s license.

  “Ah, good. Nice to tie up loose ends. Would you mind signing?”

  He opened a folder that had been wedged under his arm and took out a form for me to sign. When I handed it back he pushed the vial toward me and smiled. “Short and sweet.”

  “What is it?”

  Reginald Singh looked confused.

  “The sample.”

  “You didn’t read the report?”

  “It’s a long story. My father disappeared a couple of months ago. I’m sort of tying up some loose ends of my own. You can call the Oakridge police department if you need confirmation.”

  Reginald Singh looked mildly dismayed and shook his head. “Oh no, no, no. You have ID. Gold nine-thirty fine.”

  “Excuse me?”

  He tapped the vial with his forefinger. “We received a sample of concentrates-the mixture of black sands and fine gold that most placer miners can easily reduce their pannings to. The work request was to determine the purity of the ore it contained. There are a number of ways to do this-ion probe analysis, fluorescence spectrometry-but fire assay is simple, suitable for small samples, and more affordable for an individual prospector. It is considered to be as accurate as any other method. We performed this type of assay on your father’s sample. We determined the fineness-the purity-of this sample to be gold nine-thirty fine.”

  “Which means?”

  “Gold is always alloyed with a certain amount of silver and other trace metals. Gold fineness is based on a scale of zero to one thousand. So, after we had separated the metal from the black sands we determined, through our assay, that its pure gold content was in the ratio of nine hundred and thirty parts to one thousand. About average for California placer gold.”

  I picked up the vial and turned it so that the light caught the small wafer of gold. “So this actually has silver in it too?”

  “No, that is pure gold. After we do the fire reduction we dissolve the silver content by immersion in a 50 percent solution of nitric acid. Weighing the sample before and after gives the percentage of non-gold metal. Is there anything else I can help you with?”

  “Well, I was wondering if you remembered anything about when my father was here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know really. Did he say anything about the samples, where he got them? Did he make any sort of comment about anything that stood out?”

  “Oh, I didn’t meet your father, I performed the assay only. One of my colleagues took the work request. I can get him if you like.”

  I said that would be good and Reginald Singh went back into the building proper. A minute later a younger man with blond hair that hadn’t been washed for a while came out and took his place behind the counter. Before he said anything he placed a large see-through plastic bag containing what looked like soil and gravel on the counter.

  “This is yours too. I haven’t been here too long and when your father…?” He raised his eyebrows and I nodded. “When your father came in he had the sample you already got, which he wanted tested for purity, and this one,” he nodded at the bag, “which he wanted tested for content, like he wanted to know how much gold was in the whole thing. I accepted it by mistake. We don’t work on samples that aren’t at least refined down to concentrates. My fault, I’m sorry.”

  “Do you remember him saying where the samples came from?”

  “Thing about prospectors-they don’t say nothing about nothing. You find gold, you’re not going to tell anyone where it is. No, he didn’t say where he got it. That one,” he pointed at the bag, “looks like river gravel to me.”

  “Did he say anything else… about anything?”

  “All I remember is that he was with another guy, about your age. And I remember because a week or so after your father submitted the samples this guy came back and wanted to pick them up and get the report. But the only name on the work request was your father’s so legally we couldn’t tell him anything and we sure couldn’t give him the samples. He was pretty pissed off about it.”

  I showed him the photo of Gareth on my cell phone. “This the guy?”

  “That’s him.”

  Out in the pickup I put the vial in my pocket and tossed the bag of dirt on the passenger seat. I made it back to Oakridge toward the end of the afternoon and picked Stan up from the warehouse. When he saw the bag of river gravel he was full of questions. I showed him the wafer of gold and spent the rest of the drive telling him about the samples and trying to contain his immediate assumption that my father had discovered a gold mine.

  We were staying the night at Marla’s place, to have dinner and help her with the last of her packing before she moved to Empty Mile, but first I wanted to drop by the real estate office where my father had worked to thank them for the gift basket they’d sent. During the drive Stan sat with the larger sample on his lap and at one point he shifted it a little and smoothed the plastic against its contents. I heard him make a small sound of happy surprise and turned to see him pointing at several small faded pink petals mixed with the dirt.

  The real estate office, like most of the other businesses in Old Town, was housed in a converted two-story wooden building that had probably been a private residence or some sort of store back in the 1800s. A large plate-glass window had been cut into the front a
nd was filled with rows of photographs advertising properties in the Oakridge area. I knew Rolf Kortekas, the guy who owned the business, well enough to say hello to. He was a Dutchman who’d come to the States as a kid-an immigrant like my father. But unlike my father he had achieved a reasonable level of financial success. I left Stan in the truck while I went inside.

  Rolf was the only one in the office that afternoon and when I walked in he stood up behind his desk and spread his arms.

  “Johnny. My God, what can I say? Do you need something? Sit down, sit down.”

  I told him I’d just dropped in to say thanks for the gift. We talked for a few minutes about my father and his disappearance and after that I asked Rolf if he had any idea why my father had bought the Empty Mile land.

  “He was a good man, your father, I think. But I can’t say that I knew him well, even after all this time. I know he bought the land, but I have no idea why. Your father wasn’t a man who confided in others.”

  The office was decorated to mimic a turn-of-the-century land office. The plank walls had been painted a muddy cream and hung with antique land documents. It had a nostalgic, comfortable feel and for a moment I gazed idly at its old-fashioned decorations and wondered if there was anything else Rolf could tell me.

  I’d been staring at a set of three pictures on the wall behind him for several seconds before I realized what they were. Black-and-white aerial photographs. Different part of the landscape, but the same size, the same gray toning as the one my father had so proudly shown Stan and me. Rolf saw me looking at them.

  “Bureau of Land Management. They had a project to photograph some of the land around here. Aerial cataloging. Helps them decide if they should move more land into government ownership, or if they have any they can get rid of because it isn’t of environmental significance. One of their surveyors was based in Oakridge for a while. We helped him out a little with local land knowledge, he gave us some prints in return.”

  “When was that?”

  “April. Your father was fascinated with them. I think he even went to see the man to talk about them.”