Empty Mile

by Matthew Stokoe

“Stan, honestly, I don’t even think about it.”

  He didn’t believe me, of course. He sat with his shoulders slumped so that his belly ballooned below his ribs and his misery was so great it almost seemed like he might sink into the riverbank beneath its weight. He was silent for several moments and then, without turning his head to look at me, asked what I’d meant when I’d accused Gareth of killing our father.

  I told him everything I’d found out, everything I suspected. He listened without interrupting and when I’d finished he didn’t speak again that day.

  I walked him back up the meadow to his trailer. He moved like his limbs were frozen. He seemed to see nothing around him and several times he stumbled against a rock or a twist of grass. Rosie took him from me when I opened their door. She led him into the trailer’s dim interior and when the door closed behind them I stood staring at it for several minutes. Then I went into my cabin and sat at the table in the kitchen with Marla and told her about the latest horror I had visited on someone I loved.

  Gareth had the good sense not to turn up at Empty Mile for a week. I spent the time sitting on the stoop staring at the meadow or walking the few yards to Stan’s trailer to check on him. At these times I would find him either staring blankly at some children’s show on his TV or half asleep in bed. If I tried to rouse him he would look sleepily at me and ask if I was all right before turning over and closing his eyes again. I began to think that I would have to get him psychiatric help. How I could do this, though, without the whole Jeremy Tripp issue coming to light, I had no idea. I was in a state of despair. I knew how badly Stan must feel. Anyone would bow under the weight of knowing they were responsible for driving a loved one to kill another human being. But Stan, who had so little experience with these dreadful adult emotions, who had so little ability to intellectualize justifications for action, would be crushed.

  That he was in pain was terrible enough, but it was made infinitely worse for me by knowing that if I had not provoked Gareth, if I had not lost my head, Stan would still be basking in the honeymoon glow of his marriage. But I had lost my head, and in so doing I had infected Stan with my own personal disease. I had passed on to him the dreadful contagion of guilt.

  When Gareth returned to Empty Mile, early one morning, he didn’t bang on the door and push his way in for breakfast as he had done in the past, but yelled from outside that he was going to start sluicing again and headed off across the meadow without waiting for an answer.

  Stan had begun to reemerge by this time and would sit in the afternoons outside his trailer, wrapped against the cooling weather, or walk with Rosie through the long grass, talking quietly and holding hands. Neither he nor I had been down to the river since Stan learned about Jeremy Tripp, and there was now such a distance between him and the workings of the world around him that I knew his time digging gold out of the ground was over.

  And for my part, there was no way I could ever work alongside Gareth again. We had reached a point where the dreadful partnership could not continue.

  Toward the end of the morning I put on a heavy coat and went down to the river. I found Gareth working one of the sluices, his face set and angry.

  “Johnny. Glad you could finally get off your ass.”

  “I’m not here to work.”

  Gareth leaned on his shovel. “What?”

  “I want to move on. I don’t care about the gold anymore. I want to sell the land to a mining company. You can have half of what we get for it.”

  “No fucking way. We are not selling. Those guys’ll pay us a fraction of what it’s worth, you know that. They’ll see us coming and fuck us in the ass without even thinking about it. No, we’re going to keep on mining just like we’ve been doing. And you’re going to behave yourself, and Marla’s going to come out of the fucking cabin and say hello to me once in a while. In fact, Johnny, while we’re on the subject, there’s a whole lot more Marla could be doing.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Given our history, how we all started off together and how we’re all together again-”

  “We’re not ‘all together again.’”

  “-how we’re all together again, I think we should share Marla. I have a share in the land, dude. I should have a share in the woman.”

  “Are you fucking insane?”

  “Gosh, I hope you haven’t forgotten that piece of pipe.”

  “Gareth, we are not sharing Marla. You’re not getting anywhere near her.”

  “Well, you’re angry now, you’re not thinking clearly. But I’m telling you, Johnboy, tomorrow I’m coming a courtin’.” Gareth smirked at me and lifted a shovel of dirt and began sifting it into the sluice.

  On my way back to the cabin I collected Stan and Rosie from their trailer. If it had been anything else I would have tried to keep Stan out of it. There was no need, after all, to load him with worries that he could do nothing about. But I knew we could not give in to Gareth and opposing him would have serious consequences for all of us. It seemed only fair, then, that Stan should be included if his future was at stake as well.

  Marla, Stan, and Rosie sat across from me in the living room. Marla and Stan looked worried. Rosie stared at her lap.

  I told them what Gareth wanted and explained that his leverage to make it happen was the threat of having me arrested for the death of Jeremy Tripp. Stan looked ashen and began squeezing his knees with his hands, trying not to cry. It occurred to me then, too late of course, that he would now feel not only responsible for making me kill Jeremy Tripp, but also for the fact that Gareth might send me to jail for it.

  “Don’t worry, Stan, we’re not giving in this time. We have to stand up to him or this will go on forever.”

  Stan spoke in a kind of croaking whisper: “But Johnny, I don’t want you to go to jail.”

  “I’m not going to jail. I don’t think Gareth will really tell the police.”

  Marla snorted incredulously. “What makes you think that?”

  “He’ll have to explain how he got the pipe and that’ll make him almost as guilty as me.”

  “He’ll send it in anonymously, you idiot.”

  “Then I’ll tell the police about him, same thing. And anyway, I think there’s more to it. I think in a weird way he doesn’t want to be without me, without you. He needs his toys to play with.”

  “What if you’re wrong?”

  “I don’t know, but we have to at least try to get out from under him. If we don’t, this kind of shit is going to keep on happening.”

  Marla made a gun with her thumb and forefinger and fired it at the side of her head. “My way would be better, Johnny.”

  Even though, if my planned opposition to Gareth failed and we were forced to capitulate, Marla would be the one suffering most at his hands, I was more worried right then about Stan. I felt powerless to do anything for him, to get past his unhappiness and help him in some way. Out of desperation, I asked him to camp out with me that night. We had often gone camping as kids and I was hoping that memories of those times and the closeness of just the two of us together outdoors would help him shed a little of his guilt.

  It was no great expedition, just a tent and some food and a hike in the afternoon, up to the top of the spur that bordered the meadow-the same hike we’d made when I’d checked my father’s aerial photograph against the landscape.

  We pitched our tent twenty yards back from the collapsed end of the spur. There was still an hour of daylight left when we were done and we prepared a fire for later then sat wearing sweaters and coats, gazing at the view. The hills ran off to the distance in broken ranks, their upper slopes copper-gold in the lowering sun, the valleys between them in shadow, filling with mist as the air cooled.

  It got cold enough for us to start our fire pretty soon, and while there was a little light left in the air we made a dinner of sausages, beans, and bread rolls. Stan became quiet as evening fell and when we were finished eating we sat close to the fire and there were long
periods of silence between us. I was hoping he would open up, that the hard shell of his depression might crack a little. But between our sparse bursts of small talk he stared into the fire and said nothing.

  We had a gas light set a couple of yards out from the fire and moths were battering themselves against its bright frosted glass. I went over and caught a few and gave them to him in the plastic bag our bread rolls had come in.

  “If you don’t have any moths, how are you going to bring the power across?”

  Stan took the bag from me and held it up to the fire. For a moment he watched the moths crawl around, then he handed the bag back to me.

  “I don’t want them. I don’t want to bring any more power across.”

  “Why not?”

  “Everything’s too wrong.”

  “Won’t the power fix it?”

  Stan breathed in and out and shook his head.

  “Look, Stan, you lit a fire when you were angry. And you did it because Jeremy Tripp did something bad to Rosie. That’s all. Everything else has nothing to do with you.”

  “You’re going to go to jail.”

  “I’m not going to jail, I told you. Nothing bad is going to happen.”

  Stan turned away from me and stared into the fire. “It is, Johnny.”

  “Stan-”

  “It is.”

  We were cold that night in the tent. We lay in our sleeping bags fully clothed and breathed steam against the close nylon walls and I told Stan all the stories I remembered from our childhood, all the tiny, normal events we had shared as brothers growing up in the same family. I wanted him to laugh, I wanted to bring back to him the memory of how it felt to be carefree. But rather than remind him of the good things in his past my stories seemed only to make him more aware of what he no longer had.

  In the morning there was frost on the ground and Stan and I stood beside the remains of our fire as the sun picked out the land around us in clear yellows and blues. For a short time, after the interruption of sleep, Stan was able to watch the scene about him without reference to the sadnesses which were currently undoing his world. He stood and looked and breathed and he was still and I saw the soft bravery which I so much associated with him return to his eyes.

  “Johnny, don’t you think it would be better if you could just live like this? If all you had to do was cook your dinner and sleep and be in the forest and you didn’t have to do anything with other people?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  Stan nodded. “Yeah…”

  He walked off to the end of the spur and sat there, knees hunched up to his chin, staring out at the landscape. I relit the fire and made coffee and cooked pancakes. I expected Stan to come when he smelled the food but he didn’t move and when I called to him he turned his head and smiled and called back, “I’m just going to sit here, okay?”

  He sat for a long time. So long that I had to busy myself packing up the tent and the rest of our things. I knew this time was good for him and I left him alone with himself as long as I could, but we had no more food with us and I was getting anxious about being away from Marla, so eventually, around midday, I had to tell him it was time to go.

  He came back from the edge of the spur and looked at the packed-up camping gear.

  “We should run away, Johnny. Get Marla and Rosie and another tent and just disappear in the forest where Gareth can’t find us.”

  For a moment he stood looking about him, then he sighed and reached down and started picking up pieces of our gear.

  When we got home Rosie was sitting in front of the trailer, listening to the soft music they liked to dance to. She had been waiting for Stan’s return and stood when she saw him, her head down as always but her hand out for his. Stan took it and kissed her and led her into the trailer. As he passed the portable stereo he turned the music off.

  After they had gone I stood looking at my cabin, at the space in front of it, at my pickup and Marla’s car, at the track that led up to the road… and I couldn’t help the uneasy feeling that Stan’s desire to run away from it all made an awful lot of sense.

  CHAPTER 35

  The next day, in the morning, the world for the four of us at Empty Mile started to fall apart. Five, if you count Gareth.

  Marla and I were on the stoop, waiting for him to arrive and begin work on the river. Stan and Rosie had come over for breakfast and were sitting inside the cabin at the kitchen table. Stan was picking at a plate of fried eggs and Rosie, who didn’t eat breakfast, was drinking black coffee.

  I felt frightened and resigned and energized all at the same time. I don’t know if I thought there was any chance that the morning would end successfully for us, but I knew that what I was about to do was something that had to be done, something it would have been wrong not to do.

  When Gareth climbed out of his Jeep and saw Marla a smile broke across his face and he made a pistol with his hand and cocked it at me.

  “Dude, what can I say? This means so much, that you two would do this for me. I can’t tell you how fucking relieved I am that we’re not going to have any trouble about it.”

  He held his arms out for Marla to come to him. She looked at him tiredly and shook her head.

  “Jesus, Gareth…”

  Gareth frowned and glanced uncertainly at me. “Dude?”

  “It’s not going to happen.”

  “Johnny, come on, man. Don’t fuck around.”

  “You’re not getting Marla.”

  “We were clear on the consequences?”

  “Go tell the cops. Do whatever the fuck you want. I’m not putting up with this insanity any longer. This is the end of it.”

  Gareth looked at Marla. I saw that she was staring at him, her eyes dark and hard, as though willing him to leave us alone. Gareth held her gaze for a long moment, then turned back to me.

  “Know what I think? I think you’re bluffing. You don’t think I’ll go through with it, do you? But I have to tell you, Johnny, Marla was mine before she was yours and this is where things get made right.”

  “You don’t share people, you fucking psycho. Just go down to the river and mine your gold.”

  “You took away the only chance I had to be happy. My one fucking chance! Why didn’t you find someone else?”

  Gareth was shouting now, almost crying, his face straining and red.

  I heard Millicent’s front door open. She waved at us as she came down her front steps but by the time she reached the bottom some of the tension surrounding Gareth and me must have communicated itself to her because she paused and stood watching us.

  “Do you know what you do to the people around you, Johnny? You fucking destroy them. Marla, your brother… Well, you’re not going to do it to me. I’m going to get what I want. And if it means taking you out, that’s what I’m going to do. You fucking asshole.”

  Gareth turned and reached for the door of his Jeep. I heard footsteps behind me, someone coming out of the cabin and onto the stoop. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a flash of gray and black as Stan, wearing his full Batman suit, rocketed past me, down onto the bare earth in front of the cabin. In his hand I saw the ugly black shape of Marla’s revolver. It was so incongruous a sight that for a second I was unable to process what I was seeing. Unfortunately, a second was all it took for Stan to raise his arm and pull the trigger.

  He’d moved so quickly that no one had had a chance to call out or say anything and when the gun fired, it fired in a place where no other noise existed. Our small world was split by the gargantuan sound of gunpowder igniting, of explosive gasses jetting from the barrel’s opening, of a bullet moving across a few short yards, from the gun’s chamber to the middle of Gareth’s back.

  For a moment it seemed that the intensity of the sound would freeze the scene, that we would be forever left staring at a three-quarter view of Stan with his arm extended, at Gareth thrown against the door of his Jeep, at the smoke in the cold air and the fine spray of blood on the car’s side windows.

&nb
sp; But then the sound was gone and Stan lowered his arm and dropped the gun and Gareth slid down the side of his car and fell backwards onto the ground. There was a long smear of blood on the Jeep’s door. In it, a few inches below the window, a small round hole marked the bullet’s exit from Gareth’s body. Across the meadow Millicent wailed weakly.

  Stan stood staring at what he had done, his body rooted to the ground, a rapid tremor playing over his arms and chest and head. I went to him and put my hand on his arm.

  “Stan…”

  “You can’t go to jail, Johnny. You just can’t.”

  I felt so complicit, so responsible for what had happened, that I could think of nothing to say to him and we stood there in silence until Rosie, who had seen the shooting from the doorway of our cabin, came down and took Stan’s hand and led him across the meadow to Millicent. When they got there all three of them went quickly up the steps and into the house.

  Marla came to me long before Stan and Rosie had finished crossing the meadow and she and I stepped close to Gareth and looked down at him. The front of his shirt was soaked with blood and more of it welled steadily from a torn cavity in the center of his chest. His bladder had let go and the crotch of his jeans was dark.

  Marla slid her hand into mine and I heard her breathe quietly to herself, “At last…”

  But Gareth wasn’t dead yet. His eyes had been half closed but they opened fully now and he coughed a mouthful of blood over his chin and spoke in a wet choking voice that made me think of a room filling with water.

  “Looks like Einstein’s fucked himself up again.”

  “Not as much as he’s fucked you up.”

  Gareth laughed and choked and spat out more blood. “He’s going to go to jail for killing me to protect you from something you did to stop him from going to jail in the first place. I think you call that irony.”

  He stopped for a moment and fought for breath. I noticed there were small bubbles forming in the pool of blood that had collected on his chest.

  “Aren’t you going to call 911?”

  “No.”

  “They might be able to save me.”