Empty Mile

by Matthew Stokoe

  “Yikes!” Stan moved another step away.

  “The grains of gold in here are covered with all sorts of shit-pine oil from the trees, magnesium, iron sulfide… I’m just cleaning them up before we use the mercury.”

  Gareth rocked the beaker gently a little while longer then drained the acid into an empty glass bottle and rinsed the concentrates several times with water from a sink in the corner of the barn. He filled a plastic milk jug with water and brought it back with the beaker to the bench.

  “Stage two. Mercury, please, nurse.”

  He nodded at a stoppered glass container under the bench. Stan handed it to him like it was a bomb. Gareth opened it and poured the shiny liquid metal onto the concentrates in the beaker. Then he poured in water from the milk jug and began swirling the beaker around, using the motion of the water to mix the mercury and the concentrates together.

  I’d seen my father go through this process several times and I knew that one of the properties of mercury is that it will absorb gold. The blob of mercury/gold compound that results is called amalgam and can be easily lifted from the remaining non-gold concentrates.

  When he was done, Gareth used an old spoon to remove the amalgam from the beaker. Without thinking, Stan and I both moved a little closer. This was magic. This was alchemy. We were now looking at a firm, dull gray lump that would soon release a pure metal we could sell for money.

  The next step had to be conducted outside because of the toxic fumes it would generate. We used a long extension cord and set the hot plate up on a stool several yards beyond the barn’s entrance. Gareth placed a Pyrex dish about two-thirds full of nitric acid on the hot plate and into this lowered the lump of amalgam. Almost immediately fumes began to rise from the surface of the acid and I had to shoo Stan back so that he didn’t inhale them. Gareth turned the hot plate on and all three of us retreated to the entrance of the barn to let the solution boil away the mercury.

  After five minutes Gareth pulled the extension cord out of its wall socket and once the acid had cooled a little we went back out and watched as he used a pair of tongs to lift out our gold.

  It would have fit the occasion, our first reduction of dirt to precious metal, if the gold Gareth held before us had been bright and solid and shiny, but mercury amalgamation yields what is known as sponge gold, gold that is the color of rust and honeycombed with holes where the mercury has been dissolved by the acid. It would take heat from a blowtorch or gas burner to bring out its true color and luster.

  Inside the barn again, we rinsed the gold and weighed it. When the needle of the scales came to rest there was a sudden silence around us. It took almost a minute for Gareth to break it by uttering a bemused “Jesus.” The needle of the scales had stopped a little past the six-ounce mark. At the current price of over nine hundred dollars an ounce we’d made more than five thousand dollars for one day’s work.

  We spent a little while passing the lump between ourselves, feeling its weight, holding it up to the light. But now that it had been refined and there was nothing more to distract us, the day’s labor began to take its toll. I was shattered and Stan looked dead on his feet. We went out to the pickup, leaving Gareth in the barn with the gold. He’d wanted to keep it to show his father and I couldn’t be bothered arguing. We had the whole river to dig up, after all.

  Stan dozed most of the way back to Empty Mile and when we got there I had to shake him to get him out of the pickup. He muttered something about going over to see Rosie, but instead plodded into the cabin still only half awake.

  It was after nine o’clock but Marla had waited to eat with us. I told her about our day, about the five thousand dollars we’d panned, how it looked like the buried river was going to make us rich. Her responses didn’t rise above the noncommittal and try as I might to infect her with some enthusiasm for a gold-dusted future she did little more than nod occasionally. Stan shoveled in his food, head down, too tired to speak. He got up after he’d finished, gave each of us a kiss, and stumbled off to his bedroom.

  When he’d gone Marla put her fork down and said tiredly, “This is the start, isn’t it?”

  “Of Gareth? Yeah.”

  “I don’t know how long I can take it, Johnny.”

  “Can’t you just focus on the money?”

  “I don’t give a shit about the money. There isn’t enough of it on the planet to make Gareth bearable. Don’t you understand what hell this is going to be for me?”

  “What do you want me to do? He owns a third of the land now, I can’t stop him from coming here. And he’s got that fucking pipe.”

  “We could move away.”

  “Marla, we need that money. I have nothing left. Stan has nothing left. I’m not saying we have to dig up every last ounce, but we need something at least.”

  Marla was quiet for a long time. Her hands were together in front of her on the table and her fingers twined anxiously around themselves. She watched them as though they were something she had no control over. Eventually she spoke.

  “You know what I dream about, Johnny? I dream about going somewhere far away. To the East Coast, maybe. Somewhere we can just live and be together and start again and nothing can come in and spoil it. Sometimes I think that’s the only way we’ll ever have a chance.”

  Later we moved to sit on the couch, and as we watched the fire burn I told her what I’d learned from David that evening-that Gareth and my father had planned to buy Empty Mile together, that for some reason they’d fallen out, and that my father had then bought the land by himself.

  Marla shrugged, unimpressed. “Small town intrigue-gotta love it.”

  “It’s more than that. Way more. Think how Gareth would have reacted. He’d done all this investigating, he was expecting a big payoff, then my father snatches it away from him. He would have freaked. He would have wanted revenge. What if he decided to get that revenge by making Pat kill herself? What if that was his reason for making the video? It makes sense. After you, me, Patricia, and Bill, the only other person who could possibly be hurt by it was my father.”

  “Pretty horrific revenge.”

  “Gareth’s a pretty horrific person.”

  “But he already told you he made it to blackmail Bill. To force him to do something about the road to the lake.”

  “That was just smoke. He wanted me to sell him Empty Mile, for Christ’s sake. He’s not going to tell me he made it to attack my father.”

  “This is about Ray’s crash again, isn’t it? The whole brakes thing. They were fucked up on Ray’s car, they were fucked up on Tripp’s car. Now you’ve got an argument between Ray and Gareth over land.”

  “Well, fuck, if we accept that Gareth made a video designed to get Pat to kill herself, it’s not much of a stretch to figure he could have tampered with my father’s brakes. And if he did that, then maybe he tried again some other way and actually ended up killing him.”

  Marla rolled her eyes. “This is getting a bit much, Johnny.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe the cars are connected, maybe they’re not, I don’t know. But I can’t see why Gareth would kill Ray. You said he made the video to punish Ray for cutting him out of the land. Okay. Pat killed herself, Ray’s punished big time-Gareth’s successful. He’s successful, he’s achieved his goal. Why would he then go on and kill him? There’s no reason for it. And whatever else he is, Gareth’s a guy who usually has a reason for what he does.”

  Marla’s logic was sound and I had nothing to contradict it with. Why would Gareth kill my father? If he’d had his revenge with Pat, why would he bother? I had no answer.

  That night, however, the question of who was right and who was wrong didn’t bother me nearly as much as the quality of Marla’s dismissal. She had been so immediate, so adamant in her rejection of my theory, that although we sat pressed against each other on a comfortable couch in front of a fire, I felt suddenly very alone. Given her feelings toward Gareth I’d expected her to be more than receptive
to the idea that he had been the cause of my father’s disappearance. Hating him so much, any halfway logical explanation should have provoked a knee-jerk reaction of support and I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something less than genuine about her refusal to agree with me.

  CHAPTER 32

  Our gold mining operation moved ahead swiftly. Gareth raised a loan against his cabins at the lake and we hired a contractor in Burton to bring in bulldozers and a gang of men. When they were done we were left with a strip of torn earth twenty yards wide and two hundred yards long. On each side of this the stronger, older trees that bordered the course of our hidden river had been left untouched and their dark trunks formed walls which made the space feel like a vast natural cathedral. The debris from the ground-clearing was stacked in house-sized piles along the bottom of the meadow. Looking down from the cabin these mounds seemed ominous and ragged, as though they were the result of preparations for some primitive battle soon to be commenced.

  We had a backhoe delivered and Gareth, who had used one before to dig drainage ditches around his cabins, trundled it through a space in the trees and parked it in the center of the cleared ground. It seemed as good a place as any to begin the process of making ourselves rich.

  Throughout these preparations Gareth left Marla alone, coming to Empty Mile only to check on the progress of the contractors, entering our cabin only when she was out at work. The first day we started mining, though, this hands-off approach changed.

  He arrived shortly after the sun had cleared the surrounding hills and the dew in the meadow was beginning to turn to a thin low-clinging mist. Marla had not yet left for the day so when I heard Gareth’s Jeep pull up I went outside with Stan and our equipment in the hope that we’d be able to head him off and go straight down to the river.

  But Gareth had other ideas. He wanted to have breakfast with us. When I told him it was out of the question he smiled at me and mimed swinging a piece of pipe. There was nothing I could do. We went back into the cabin and sat around the table. Stan ate a second bowl of cereal. Gareth drank coffee and ate toast with exaggerated relish.

  As Marla moved from one part of the cabin to another in her preparations for work he followed her closely with his eyes, trying to engage her in conversation whenever he could. She refused to answer him and did her best to pretend he wasn’t there, but I could tell by the tight lines of her face and the high color in her cheeks that it was a struggle for her. She left without eating anything or saying goodbye. As she went through the front door I saw something in Gareth’s eyes. It was only there a moment, but I caught it nevertheless-a wounded tenderness, a longing for something that had been lost forever.

  A little while later Stan, Gareth, and I walked down the meadow and through the screen of trees to where the backhoe waited, cold and dewy from its night outdoors. Gareth slapped the engine cowling then put his hands on his hips and turned to us like we were all part of a gang.

  “This is it, guys. Let’s make it happen.”

  Our plan was to use the backhoe to clear the three or four feet of soil that had built up over the old riverbed and then to excavate the material beneath it. We had two sluices, one from my father’s cache of equipment, one supplied by Gareth, and these were to be our primary means of processing the gold-bearing sand and gravel.

  A sluice is basically a long rectangular box open at both ends. On its floor, running horizontally across it, are a series of inch-high bars called riffles. The sluice is placed deep enough at the edge of a river so that the base of it is submerged but its walls rise a couple of inches above the water. Dirt is fed into the upstream end and the current of the water washes it along the length of the sluice. As it passes from one end to the other, the heavier material settles to the bottom of the box where it is caught by the riffles, while the mud and sand are washed out of the other end and into the river. Every so often the sluice is taken out of the water and whatever has collected against the riffles is knocked off into a bucket. This material is then further refined by panning. The result is concentrates-the same mixture of black sand and grains of gold we had refined by mercury amalgamation in Gareth’s barn.

  Running a sluice requires a certain amount of skill and a lot of attention. Dirt has to be fed in at just the right rate or the sluice becomes overloaded and stones and other larger pieces of debris have to be constantly picked out by hand. But the amount of dirt that can be processed is exponentially higher than by using a pan alone, and if there is more than one person operating the sluice-one to feed it and one to pick out debris-the process goes even faster.

  Because of his experience, Gareth was going to run the backhoe and build up a stock of riverbed material while Stan and I concentrated on the sluicing. That first morning, though, Gareth was too anxious to see what results we’d get to pile up more than a couple of hundred pounds of gravel and sand on the riverbank before stopping and joining us at the sluices.

  We worked without speaking much. Carrying dirt in large plastic buckets, using shovels to sift it into the sluices, watching carefully as the water turned muddy, letting it clear again so we could see the black sand building against the riffles, moving the sluice a little side to side to let the light catch flecks of gold, reaching beneath the water to touch them with a fingertip…

  Toward the end of the afternoon, while it was still fully light, we put the concentrates we’d collected in a plastic container. For a while the three of us just stood around and looked at it, ticking off in our minds all the future purchases this grubby metallic sand represented. Then we carried it up the meadow and put it in the shed at the back of the cabin. Our first day was over.

  Stan went off to see Rosie. Gareth climbed into his Jeep and spoke to me through the window before he drove away.

  “Some things can make everything else all right, just wipe the slate clean, don’t you think? All my shit with the road to the lake, all your shit with Tripp-doesn’t mean much now, huh?”

  “Maybe we should split what we get each day. I don’t want you whining about how we’ve stolen some.”

  “I trust you, Johnboy. Why wouldn’t I?” He winked and started his car. “See you tomorrow. I’m looking forward to breakfast. Maybe Marla will join us this time.”

  Life quickly fell into a routine for Stan and Gareth and me-digging dirt and sluicing it, panning it down and then, every few days, amalgamating it with mercury. It was boring, tiring, backbreaking work that raised blisters on our hands and waterlogged our feet, but the richness of the dirt we were mining overrode our fatigue so that we worked in an avaricious trance where the filling of our bucket each day with black sand did not calm us with its promise of certain wealth but drove us on to want more and more and more. It was as though we became lost each morning and only regained ourselves when we threw down our tools at the end of the afternoon and walked away from the earth we had torn up and the river we had muddied.

  Being wet every day forced Stan to change his approach to his moths. Instead of keeping them in a pouch around his neck, he put them, while he was working, in a large glass jar with a screw top which he stood on a nearby rock. The moths were always dying but Stan didn’t seem to care and called the jar his power generator and often during the day would touch it and hold it up and breathe in deeply with the glass pressed against his forehead.

  All three of us stopped shaving, and as any clothes became soaked and filthy after five minutes of work, we tended, at the river, to wear the same things day after day without washing them. Sometimes Stan would bring his cassette player with him and run it on batteries and we would work to the sound of his mellow dance music, but mostly there was just the sound of water splashing, shovels going into dirt, and at intervals through the day the grind of the backhoe’s diesel engine.

  Most days we took at least five ounces of gold from our hidden river. There were times when the content of the dirt dropped, when we found ourselves with nothing in our sluices after several hours work, but then all that was needed
was for Gareth to direct his backhoe more to the left or the right and the gold always returned. Gradually, in this way, we were able to define the banks of the old river and get some idea of the distribution of gold along its length. And the better our picture of the river became, the more consistent our returns were.

  We worked the first ten days straight through. After that we were exhausted and we took a day off to melt down the gold we had so far acquired in a crucible at Gareth’s place and take it to the assayer in Burton. We walked out of the Minco office with a check for a little more than forty thousand dollars. We’d sold them around fifty five ounces, but there was a commission fee plus our gold contained a small percentage of silver. This brought the per-ounce price down a little and also incurred a charge for the further refining that would be necessary to turn it into gold that fell into the standard purity range of between.995 and.999.

  None of this was unexpected and we rode back to Oakridge with Gareth smugly proclaiming that at this rate each of us would earn a quarter of a million dollars in a year. While he was on this high I got him to agree to confining our workdays to Monday to Friday with the weekends off. This was necessary anyhow if we were going to last the distance, but it also meant Marla would at least be spared him two days a week.

  But two days a week for Marla was, by then, nowhere near enough. Since we’d started mining she’d descended rapidly into a state of outright distress. When Gareth was anywhere on the property she withdrew completely, sequestering herself in our bedroom, coming out only for brief dashes to the kitchen or bathroom or to run for her car.

  In fact, during the same period, the stresses at play on all elements of life at Empty Mile had grown greater and more destructive and it seemed now only a matter of time before everything must surely fall to pieces-before Marla went berserk, or Stan became lost to a world of moths and power, or I could no longer hold myself back from confronting Gareth over my father’s disappearance.