Empty Mile

by Matthew Stokoe

  “Is he still in Oakridge?”

  “No, he moves around, but he’s in Burton sometimes, I think. I have his card if you’d like it.”

  Rolf rummaged through a drawer in his desk and passed me a business card for a surveyor named Howard Webb. I stood up to go. Rolf stood as well and leaned across his desk to shake my hand and tell me if he could help me out with anything to just let him know.

  At the office door, before I went out, I thought of something and stopped. “Do you know who my father’s accountant was?”

  Rolf laughed pleasantly. “You won’t get mad at me if I tell you your father was not so very smart when it came to money? If any man should have had an accountant it was him. But he didn’t. Again, as far as I know. But you work with someone, you get to know these kinds of things. He didn’t have an accountant.”

  CHAPTER 23

  On the street outside Marla’s house there was a small rented dumpster half full of the things she was throwing away. Inside, the house had taken on a feeling of desolation. The living room was piled with the furniture she was going to get rid of in her own yard sale, the bedroom my father and Pat had used was crammed with the things she wanted to keep, and all over the house there were open cartons in various stages of being filled. Everywhere was sad and too bright and devoid of the welcoming comfort that for ten years had made the place a home.

  While Stan watched superhero cartoons on a TV Marla hadn’t yet disconnected, she and I sat in the small garden behind the house with bottles of beer and caught the last of the afternoon sun.

  I told her about going to Burton and up to the lake, and I showed her the two metal brackets-one from the tree, one from David’s workshop. She took them from me and sat with one in each hand, staring dully at them, her head bowed as though the metal’s touch had somehow drained her energy. I explained what I thought they meant.

  “You can’t buy them anywhere, Gareth’s father is the only person who makes them. Gareth must have taken one, hammered it onto the tree, and attached the camera to it before we got there. Then he probably just turned it on and left. Those things run for like two hours. What I can’t figure out is how the hell he knew where we were going to be. Would Bill have told him? He picked the spot, after all.”

  Marla didn’t say anything. I was so preoccupied with trying to solve the puzzle that I hardly noticed.

  “But that doesn’t make sense. Bill and Gareth don’t even speak, and Bill would never let Gareth get that sort of power over him. But then we come back to how Gareth could possibly have known where to put the camera.”

  I groaned and ran my hands over my face.

  “It has to be Gareth, but how? How the fuck did he know where we’d be?”

  Finally Marla raised her head and I saw that there were tears on her cheeks. When she spoke her first words were so quiet I could hardly hear them. “Gareth knew because he was the one who chose the place. He told me I had to take Bill there.”

  “What are you talking about? Bill led us there.”

  Marla shook her head. “I told him it had to be that place behind the rock or we wouldn’t do it. He knew where to go because back when I was hooking, when I first started, before Gareth or anything, we’d both been there. Together… I just let it look like he was leading the way.”

  “You fucked Bill Prentice?”

  Marla stood abruptly, took two steps away from me, bent at the waist, and threw up on the grass. She stayed like that for a while, clearing her throat and wiping her mouth, then she straightened and turned back to me.

  “It was a long time ago. You know I have this stuff in my past. Please don’t be a bastard about it.”

  Her hands were shaking and her crying, which had been interrupted by her throwing up, started again. I took a deep breath and tried to force the image of Bill on top of Marla out of my head. Then the deeper meaning of what she’d said hit me.

  “Gareth picked the place? So the whole thing was a setup?”

  “I didn’t know anything about the camera, I swear. I swear, Johnny.”

  “Well, what the fuck, then?”

  She took a breath and tried to calm herself. “During the time I was hooking in Burton I went with Bill a couple of times. Once over there and once at that place at the lake. That was it. I didn’t want to be doing it with somebody from where I lived so I cut him off. A long time later, when I had my job and Gareth was pimping me in Oakridge, I mentioned having been with Bill to him. No reason, it was just conversation, but it meant he knew about our connection. And one day, a little while after you got back, he told me I had to get Bill to watch you and me having sex. And he told me it had to be at that place up at the lake and that he had to know beforehand when it was going to happen. And I couldn’t mention anything about him to Bill. I had no idea why. I mean, it was fucking weird, but in the end it was just one more installment of Gareth’s madness. There was nothing I could do about it anyhow. You didn’t know about my past then and Gareth said if I didn’t do it he’d tell you I’d been a hooker. I was so scared of you finding out. I thought you’d never want anything to do with me again and I couldn’t take that. I couldn’t take losing you a second time. So I did what he said and I didn’t ask questions. But I promise you, I absolutely promise, I didn’t know it was going to be filmed.”

  “How do you get some guy to want to watch you having sex with someone else?”

  “It wasn’t hard, you know what he’s like. I’d never bumped into him at work before because our offices are in different buildings, but it wasn’t hard for me to find an excuse to take a file over to him. He recognized me right away and started offering me money for sex. I told him I didn’t do that anymore but if he wanted just to watch I could arrange something. He jumped at it. And I… I made it all look like a chance meeting so you wouldn’t know.”

  “If Gareth wanted something incriminating on video why didn’t he just get you to fuck him?”

  “Because Gareth’s a sick bastard and whatever he was up to, it would have tickled him to have you involved somehow. He hates you just as much as he hates me.”

  “But I might not have wanted to do it.”

  “Then it wouldn’t have happened. But I knew you would. And so did Gareth. I’m so sorry, Johnny. I could cut my heart out.”

  Marla had stopped crying but her face was swollen and she looked tired and incredibly sad. She stood in front of me as though she was waiting to be executed.

  I could have hated her for dragging me into something so sordid, I suppose. But I didn’t. I was angry that I’d been used in someone else’s plan. I was angry with Gareth for making Marla do it. But I wasn’t angry with her. How could I be? As she’d said, I knew she had these things in her past. And I knew that I had played a role in creating that past. But even if I had not felt some measure of responsibility for how life had turned out for her, I could not have hated her the way she looked then. The need for this relationship with me, the utter necessity of it for her, was just too plain on her face.

  So instead of shouting and accusing, I held her in the sunlight of that fading afternoon, in the small garden of the house she loved so much and was soon to leave, and tried somehow to absorb back into myself the seeds of damage my selfishness had sown eight years before. Later, we sat down again and finished our beer and talked about Gareth and the video.

  “So the question now is why? Why did he do it?”

  Marla shrugged. “It can’t be anything related to us. What do we have to lose? We don’t have reputations to worry about and we were hardly being unfaithful to anyone. I do know that there was bad blood between Pat and Gareth, though.”

  “I didn’t know they knew each other.”

  “She used to have this dog, this big Lab that went everywhere with her, never on a leash, a bit old and dopey. She loved that dog. About a year ago Gareth was pushing his father around Old Town and it started barking at the wheelchair, really frightened the old man. Which was a big mistake, because a couple of days later G
areth ran it over with his Jeep. It was an ‘accident,’ of course, but…” Marla shrugged. “Pat knew he did it on purpose and she hated him for it.”

  “A year ago? That’s a long time for Gareth to wait around. Plus he doesn’t get anything material out of it. What if the video was a blackmail attempt that went wrong? Gareth might have thought he could pressure Bill into pushing the road through with the council.”

  “I don’t think Bill has that sort of power. The Resource and Development Committee has to vote on things like that.”

  “Which he’s on.”

  “He’s the head of it but there are six other members.”

  “Surely he could influence them to some extent.”

  “Maybe.”

  Marla didn’t sound convinced.

  “Well, whatever the deal is, Gareth’s up to something. And it’s more than just Bill or Pat. All these connections between him and my father keep cropping up. Like at the Elephant Society-Chris Reynolds, the first thing he remembers about them is their interest in the history of Empty Mile. But Gareth’s never said a thing about it, and I gave him plenty of opportunity today. The sample thing too-if he and my father had panned gold somewhere and were excited enough about it to get it assayed, wouldn’t you think he’d have mentioned it by now? And on top of that he won’t shut up about wanting to buy Empty Mile.”

  We sat outside for a while longer, then we went in and dragged Stan away from the TV and had dinner.

  The rest of that evening was spent lugging furniture around, wrapping things in newspaper, and packing cardboard cartons with Marla’s possessions. Marla was throwing away a lot of stuff and at one point after it got dark I made a few trips out to the dumpster with black plastic bags filled with papers and junk she no longer wanted.

  The sides of the dumpster were high enough that I had to heave the bags up and half throw them into it. I misjudged my swing on one of them and caught it on a corner. The bag split open and a small avalanche of papers spilled out onto the grass next to the road. I was tired and for a moment I felt like just walking away from the mess, but I knew that any small breeze in the night would blow the papers into the road. So I bent and gathered up armfuls of old brochures, magazines, bills, and credit card statements and stuffed them back into what was left of the bag. Halfway through the pile I saw, poking from between the pages of an old computer manual, the corner of a photograph.

  I was vaguely interested to see what sort of picture Marla might be throwing away so I pulled it out to look at it. I got a whole lot less vague when I saw what the photo was of-Marla, posing in front of the entrance to a wooden roller coaster, beside a sign with San Diego painted on it. A quick-fire vacation snap on a standard-size print. Nothing remarkable about it. Except that it was a duplicate of the photo I’d found in my father’s trunk a few weeks back. Marla was posing instead of him but the place and the framing were the same. And from what I could remember even the light and the color of the sky behind the wooden framework matched.

  In the photo Marla looked a couple of years younger than she was now. She was laughing as though the person behind the camera had just made a joke.

  It could have been a coincidence. By some amazing twist of fate they might both, at different times, have gone to San Diego. They might both have had a photo taken on the same spot. But they hadn’t. It wasn’t a coincidence. I knew it as I looked at the picture. The photos were too similar.

  So, what, then? A vacation together. Perhaps my father had had a real estate convention to go to and had taken Marla along as a thank you for her occasional help with Stan. If it had been anyone other than him I might have suspected the photo was evidence of an affair, a dirty weekend away from the eyes of Oakridge. But not with my father. It couldn’t have happened.

  Yet as I stared at the photo in the spill of light from the porch behind me I couldn’t help feeling the small cold feet of suspicion patter along some dark and deep-buried corridor within me. Why had neither my father nor Marla ever mentioned taking a trip so far from Oakridge? Surely it should have come up in conversation at some point. Unless there was a reason to hide it.

  I could ask Marla, of course. But what if there was something there? Back in the years when I was away. It dawned on me that if there was, I didn’t want to know anything about it. That kind of emotional mother lode was something I just wasn’t equipped to handle. And, too, after her role in the forest sex session with Bill, which I knew she already felt terrible about, divulging an affair with my father might be more than she could safely bear.

  So I folded the photo and put it in my wallet and cleaned up the rest of the spilled papers. In bed that night, Marla curled herself against my back, her arms tight around my chest, as though she could not stand to have even an inch of space between us.

  Before work the next day Stan and I drove over to Empty Mile. I wanted to compare the soil in the sample the assayer had given me with that around the supposed fence post holes my father and Gareth had dug.

  We stopped at the cabin to pick up a spade then headed on down the meadow and into the trees until we came to one of the holes. Stan stood over it and frowned.

  “That’s a really neat hole. It’s too thin for a spade.”

  “He did it with a fence post digger.”

  Stan crouched down and peered into it. “There’s no water.”

  He lay on the ground and reached into the hole with his arm.

  “I can just touch the bottom.”

  He brought up several handfuls of earth and piled them next to the hole-a loose mixture of sand and gravel. I opened the plastic sample bag and took a handful out and dropped it next to the mixture on the ground. There seemed to be no difference between the two.

  As I was closing the bag I felt Stan tug my sleeve. I looked up to see him pointing at a small bush a few feet from the hole. It had dull gray-green leaves and I didn’t know what sort it was but on the dusty earth around it there was a scattering of small pink petals; some of them had drifted to the edge of the hole. Stan prodded the sample bag.

  “Same flowers, Johnny.”

  When we pulled up at the Plantasaurus warehouse later in the morning it looked the same as it always did. The day was fine and the sky was clear and we were all set for a solid day’s work. As we got out of the pickup, though, we saw that the corrugated metal of the sliding door was buckled around the lock and that the door itself was open a couple of inches. We had always been very careful about locking up because of our plant stock and it was immediately obvious to both of us that we had had an intruder. Inside, it was more obvious still.

  Our stock of large plants-the weeping figs, dracaenas, yuccas, etc.-had all been perfectly healthy the day before. Now, they were either dead or very rapidly dying and the air in the warehouse smelled strongly of bleach.

  When Stan saw the sad ranks of trees he started running on the spot, pumping his arms and making a kind of high whining noise through his nose. I felt an overwhelming tiredness. And anger. But mostly I just wanted to sit down and cover my face and not think about Plantasaurus ever again. I knew I couldn’t do that, though, not while Stan still had such a heavy emotional investment in the business, so I held him and calmed him instead, and then we got down to the task of figuring out what had happened. It wasn’t particularly difficult.

  We traced the smell of bleach to the plastic-wrapped cylinders of soil in which each of the affected plants stood.

  It was something we’d seen before, of course, the day Jeremy Tripp had so angrily returned the plants we’d installed in his house, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out he was responsible this time too. It was a bad blow. We had Plantagion competing against us, and now we’d lost the stock that should have seen us through to the end of the month. I thought about sitting Stan down and explaining how bad our chances of keeping Plantasaurus going were in the face of such opposition. But before I could muster the nerve, he looked across at me from where he’d been poking at a dead kentia palm and said we’d h
ave to order a new shipment of plants right away. After that, I knew he wasn’t going to listen to anything I might say about winding down the business.

  We spent the next couple of hours clearing the dead plants out of the warehouse. At one point I noticed that Stan had disappeared. I found him outside at the rear of the building, lying flat on his back in the dirt. He’d tipped the contents of his moth matchbox onto his face and the insects, dull from so long in the box, moved sluggishly in the depressions beside his nose and over his closed eyelids.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Recharging.”

  I stood there for a moment, but he didn’t open his eyes, so I went back to work and a few minutes later he joined me and we didn’t talk about the moths.

  After the cleaning up was done, we began our maintenance visits for that day. At each store or office, after we’d watered, trimmed, and cleaned the displays, we asked if the customers were satisfied with our service. No one had any complaints, and most of them were openly complimentary, but at three of the places they also said they had been approached by a representative of another plant company offering to provide the same level of service at a lower cost. One of the customers had a card the rep had left-tropical palm against a setting sun, the name Plantagion in orange letters. Another customer quoted the name from memory, said he remembered it because it sounded like a disease.

  We’d signed all our customers to either six-or twelvemonth agreements and none of the three we spoke to that day wanted to pay the fee that early cancellation incurred. But I felt compelled to promise that we’d meet the competing offer when the agreements came up for renewal. Stan nodded seriously as I made this offer and stepped forward and shook their hands as we left.

  At the end of the day, back at Empty Mile, Stan went over to see Rosie and I spent a long time sitting on the stoop, wondering what it was I had done that had pissed Jeremy Tripp off so badly.