Empty Mile (18 page)

I gathered the pages, the land document, and the aerial photo together and put them back in the trunk. As I was about to close the lid I noticed a photo that had slipped from a stack of Kodak packets which filled one corner of the box. I picked it up and looked at it. It was a shot of my father in front of the entrance gate to a large wooden roller coaster. He was standing overly upright and grinning broadly, as though he was clowning for whoever had taken the shot. There was a sign beside him on which I could read the words
San Diego
but nothing else. I put the picture back in its packet and closed the trunk.

In an effort to cheer Stan up I talked him into driving to town with me to have lunch in a diner. With money so tight we didn’t eat out and it was something of a treat. Even so, he was reluctant and stayed silent for most of the journey. But that changed rather dramatically when we hit the edge of Old Town.

We were driving along a street of stores when a guy in his early twenties came out of a bookshop lugging a weeping fig in a cylindrical planter. Stan saw him first and yelped for me to look.

“Hey, Johnny, he’s stealing our plants.”

At first I thought Stan was right and I pulled quickly to the curb. Then I realized that the store the guy had come out of wasn’t one of our customers.

“We don’t do that place.”

“What?”

“It’s not our plant.”

“But it’s a rental. Look at the planter.”

We watched the guy carry the plant a few yards along the sidewalk to a shiny new van that had the business name
Plantagion
and a phone number painted on each side under an orange sun and palm tree silhouette.

Stan let out a wail and started shaking his hands in front of him like he was trying to ward off some dreadful attack. “It’s not fair! It’s not fair! It was my idea.”

“Stan, calm down. A lot of other people do it in a lot of other towns and cities. The idea’s not ours.”

“But I thought of it for Oakridge. So I could be a businessman.” He dug frantically in his jeans pocket and pulled out the matchbox he kept his moths in. He pushed it open and held it to his mouth and started breathing rapidly in and out.

“What are you doing?”

“Moth essence. I gotta charge up.”

“Stop it.”

“I have to, Johnny. The connection’s getting weak. The power isn’t coming through. That’s why this is happening.”

“Jesus Christ, Stan!”

I pulled his hands away from his face. He looked suddenly frightened.

“Johnny … Am I going crazy?”

I took a breath and forced myself to calm down. “You’re not going crazy. But I don’t think any power or anything not coming back from some other place has anything to do with that guy and his van.”

“Why is he here, then? We checked and no one else did plants in Oakridge.”

Stan was right. Before we’d kicked off Plantasaurus we’d done a search of the local business directory to make sure no one else in town was already leasing plants. We hadn’t found anyone. Which meant Plantagion had only recently started operating.

“I don’t know.”

What I did know, though, was that we were in trouble—our business simply would not survive competition. And looking at Stan I could see he knew this just as well as I did.

As we sat in the pickup and watched the Plantagion guy move plants and sacks of potting mix around in the back of his van I wondered about the timing of this new company.

I used my cell and dialed the number on the side of the van. The call was answered by a female voice that sounded vaguely familiar. I told the woman I was interested in leasing plants and asked where the Plantagion office was. She gave me an address in the Oakridge commercial precinct. Stan and I put lunch on hold.

The Oakridge commercial precinct was an area of warehouses and workshops set in a couple of acres of tarmac five minutes drive from the eastern edge of Back Town. There’d been an outcry by environmentalists when it was built in the ’80s, but it had given the town a solid base for its small manufacturing and service industries.

Plantagion occupied a pressed metal warehouse on the edge of a maze of similar buildings. A sliding glass door in the front wall opened directly onto a reception/office area and as soon as Stan and I stepped inside I understood why the voice on the phone had sounded familiar. Vivian, the woman Gareth was supposedly in love with, the woman I’d bumped into in Jeremy Tripp’s bedroom, sat behind a desk with an Oakridge business directory open in front of her. I saw that a number of entries had been crossed through. It looked like she was working her way down the page. She was in the middle of dialing a number but she put down the phone when she saw us and waved us to a couple of chairs in front of the desk.

“You can’t be here to lease plants.”

“We wanted to check out the competition. You do know you’re the competition?”

“Of course, but I don’t like to think in terms of competition. Do you know Schumacher?”

“The car racing guy?”

“Economist. Buddhist economics. Came up with a model for a limited-growth economy. Very popular among us greenies.”

“Er, anyway … This is your business?”

“No. I was bored up there on the hill. Jeremy Tripp is the owner. You’ve met him I think.” She looked archly at me as she said this. “He asked me to manage it. I’m very good at getting things started.”

“When did you open?”

“A week ago.”

“Got many customers?”

“Quite a few. But with the prices Jeremy’s charging it’s not surprising; they are far too low.”

“Can I see a price list?”

“Of course.”

She handed me a printed sheet that gave fees for various combinations of plants and the charges for maintaining them. What we offered customers was simpler, but wherever I could make a comparison, Plantagion was at least twenty-five percent cheaper than we were.

“We saw your van.”

“We have two. Jeremy had them painted specially. He said he wanted them to be visible. To stand out.”

“You’ve got
two
vans?”

“Two vans, two men working them, a warehouse man, and me.”

I glanced at Stan. His face was pale and set. He looked as though he’d just been robbed.

“I am not trying to intimidate you. But Jeremy said that you would visit us and he wanted me to be quite open about how robust the business is.”

“It’s an odd business for someone like him to be involved in. I mean, there’s not a whole lot of money in it.”

“He’s planning to grow it. Jeremy was quite the big shot out in the world, you know.”

After that there was a moment of awkward silence. Stan broke it by clearing his throat and nodding toward a dracaena in the corner behind her. “Your plant is too wet. The ends of its leaves are dead.”

Vivian glanced at it, then her phone rang and when she answered it I nudged Stan and we got up and headed out of the office.

Outside the warehouse the day seemed too hot and too bright. The right kind of climate for forests and rivers and mountains but wrong for this area of tarmac and bolted-together metal. The heat came off the steel walls of the buildings like it was trying to push us away.

As we passed the end corner of one of the adjacent warehouses someone called out to me. I turned and saw Gareth pressed close to the metal wall. He was partly covered by the shadow the building made and it looked like he had chosen the spot for the small measure of concealment it offered. He waved quickly for us to come over, then pulled us around the corner so that we were out of sight of the Plantagion warehouse.

“Is he in there?”

“Who?”

“Tripp.”

“I don’t think so. What are you doing?”

“I told you something was going on. She’s fucking him.”

“How do you know?”

“I can tell.”

“So you’re, what? Trying to get evidence?”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“And then what?”

“Well, I’m not a hundred percent sure about that, Johnboy. Maybe I’ll just walk away. Maybe I’ll cut his balls off. That’d help you out, wouldn’t it? Neutralize the competition, so to speak.”

“We have to go.”

“We should catch up sometime, it’s been awhile.”

Stan and I began to walk away. But before we’d gone more than a couple of steps I felt Gareth’s hand on my arm.

“Did you think about the Empty Mile land? I’m still interested, you know.”

“I’m not selling it.”

“But you guys have got to need the money.”

“Maybe so, but it’s not for sale.”

Gareth frowned at me for a moment, then turned away without saying anything else and went back to the corner of the warehouse.

Stan didn’t want to go to lunch anymore and asked me to take him home. When we got there I sat with him out in the back garden, watching the trees in the shimmering afternoon stillness while he slumped in his chair like the bones had been pulled from his body. When I stirred, about to get up and go into the cooler house, he roused himself and said, “Jeremy Tripp is trying to get us.”

It was true. Any businessman would know that Oakridge couldn’t support two plant companies. Even if they charged similar prices, one would eventually have to go. The fact that Plantagion was charging twenty-five percent less than us, a level of pricing that simply couldn’t earn them a worthwhile return, said to me that Tripp had set the business up purely to compete us out of existence. And he’d wanted us to know it. He’d wanted us to see the vans, he’d wanted us to go to the office.

Stan stood up and headed into the house. “I’ve got to get some more moths.”

Toward the end of the afternoon I made Stan an early dinner. He didn’t eat much of it and when I left to go visit Marla he was sitting in front of the TV in his Batman suit. He’d found some moths and added them to the ones he already had. The matchbox was stuck in his utility belt.

CHAPTER 20

W
hen I got to Marla’s place she was just getting out of her car with an armful of the empty cardboard boxes she’d been scavenging in preparation for her forced move. We went inside and she dropped them on top of some others in a corner of the living room. I asked her if she’d started looking for a place. She shook her head.

“I haven’t been able to face it.”

“I’ve been thinking about something.”

“Something about you and me?”

“Yeah.”

“About us living together?”

“Makes sense to me … if you want to.”

Marla buried her head in my chest and held me. “Thank you, Johnny. Thank you …”

“There’s a problem, though. We got the eviction notice on the house today.”

“So sell the land. It’s in your name. Sell it, pay off the house, we can live there together.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not? What does it matter what Ray wanted?”

“He must have had a reason for buying the place. Until I know what it was I can’t sell it.”

“Look, I had to research local Gold Rush history when I first started my job. Empty Mile’s on the Swallow River and the Swallow River used to be a big gold river. Maybe Ray thought there was still something to be found.”

“It’s called Empty Mile for a reason.”

“I’m not saying there
is
gold there, I’m saying Ray might have
thought
there was. He was in the Elephant Society. They’re nice people, but all of them live for this idea that one day they’re going to dig up a million dollars. I went to a lot of meetings for that research and I saw Ray there all the time. He was into it as much as any of them. He’d go on and on about how the Forty-Niners couldn’t have found everything. If you feel like that, maybe you can make yourself believe something about a piece of land next to a river.”

Marla went into her bedroom to change. When she came out she was looking at her watch.

“If you want to ask about Empty Mile we’ve still got time.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Elephant Society. They meet tonight. They might be able to tell you something about it.”

“We’re not members.”

“Like they’d care. Plus they know me from when I used to go.”

The Elephant Society met in Back Town in a hall above a short row of stores that had been built in the ’20s. The place was a couple of blocks before the town hall, on the other side of the road, and was rented out as a resource to various groups in the community. We went up a flight of wooden stairs to a long room with a cathedral ceiling that ran the length of two storefronts. Lights in glass globes were suspended from the ceiling in a line down the middle. The glass was opaque and had aged to a murky cream. The floorboards were bare and unpolished and dust rose from them so that the air in the place seemed dry and moved against the skin with a papery feel.

At the entrance a woman sitting behind a card table asked us to sign our names in an attendance register. The page she turned toward us bore what I assumed were the signatures and names of the members who had already arrived. The day’s date was stamped at the top of the page and beside it the words
Magnetometers and their Role in Placer Gold Deposit Location
were printed in red ink. The woman saw me reading and said helpfully, “Tonight’s lecture.”

Metal folding chairs had been set in five rows at the opposite end of the hall. A few were occupied, but we were early for the meeting and most of the ten or so people in the hall stood around in twos and threes chatting. I recognized a couple of them from the Society picnic.

As Marla led me toward an office door behind the chairs she whispered, “Chris Reynolds is the chairman. He knows as much as anybody. It’s good we’re early, we can talk to him and then get out before the meeting starts.”

“And miss the lecture?”

“Most of them don’t exactly live up to that description. Someone stands up and drones on about his or her pet subject for half an hour. Different one each meeting. This diggings, that diggings, the journey across the country to the gold fields, where’s the best place to look for gold now …”

“Not good?”

“Some of them are okay, but you come often enough and you start hearing the same thing again and again.”

The upper half of the office door was frosted glass set in dark oak. Marla tapped on it and a voice told her to come in.

We entered a small room that was paneled to waist height in more oak. An old wooden desk that had lost its varnish filled most of the space. Chris Reynolds sat behind it poring over some sort of financial ledger. He had a tired, weathered face and the skin around his eyes looked bruised. I hadn’t recognized the name, but I remembered the face. He owned a prospector supply store in town called the Nugget Shooter and we’d recently installed a couple of standing plants for him. Like anyone else who read the Oakridge paper he knew about my father’s disappearance.

We all said hi. Marla and I sat on chairs in front of his desk and she told him I was interested in the history of

Empty Mile. He looked happy to have the chance to hold forth on his area of expertise.

“Empty Mile. What do you want to know?”

“Anything you can tell me. My father bought some land there on the Swallow River and I’m trying to figure out why.”

“You’re here, so you must be thinking gold, one way or another.”

“It’s the only thing that stands out about the place.”

He laughed. “You could say that about almost anywhere around here. Look, the Swallow was thoroughly prospected during the Rush. There’s no gold left in that river, believe me. Not the sort you can take out with a pan. A lot of miners came this way. And a lot of miners means that all the gold got found. Even the name of the place bears it out. Empty Mile. Empty, nothing left. They came, they saw, they dug it all up. Did such a good job everyone who came later remarked on it. Started calling it … ?” He raised his eyebrows.

“Empty Mile.”

“Exactly. And your father would have known that the same as any other member of the Society. It’s a nice thought, but I can’t see him thinking he’d bought himself an undiscovered strike. He must have had another reason.”

“That’s the origin of the name? That it was mined so thoroughly it became … notorious? It couldn’t have been that there just wasn’t any gold there to start with?”

“The Swallow was rich pretty much all the way up to where Oakridge is today. It doesn’t make sense that Empty Mile was barren. I know that stretch of river. The banks, the riverbed, slow water. There couldn’t
not
have been gold there. And there’s actually an account by a miner who passed through there complaining about the way it had been cleaned out. It’s a pretty strong indication that there had to be something there in the first place.”

He twisted in his chair and pulled open a drawer in a dented filing cabinet behind him. After a minute spent struggling with densely packed hanging folders he turned back to us and handed me a sheet of paper. It was a photocopy of a handwritten page. The creases where the original had been folded into eighths were visible in dark lines of toner.

“Copy of a letter sent back home by a miner to his wife. Part of a document collection they have at Berkeley. He mentions Empty Mile by name. Earliest reference to it anyone’s found.”

He nodded for me to read it.

The writing was rough, as though the man who’d written it had had only his knees to rest the paper against. It wasn’t flowery or poetic, and it wasn’t as carefully put together as Nathanial Bletcher’s journal, but it must have meant more than gold to the woman it was written for—news from a husband thousands of miles away, perhaps the only confirmation he was still alive. As I read through the endearments, the report on his health, his hopes that he and his wife would be together again before another year passed, I couldn’t help feeling how intensely lonely life must have been for so many of the men who went looking for gold.

I found the reference Reynolds had mentioned in the last third of the letter. Just a couple of lines at the end of a brief description of the man’s most recent journeying.

I am camped this day at a place the miners have learned to call Empty Mile, so well has it been dug. The men here mutter that Chinese must have been the first to come upon this spot.

The letter was dated May 29, 1849, almost two months after Nathaniel Bletcher had reached the same stretch of river.

Bletcher’s journal would be an important find for Chris Reynolds, I knew. But until I had either solved the mystery of Empty Mile or discounted the land as worthless I wasn’t about to share the one thing I’d discovered about its history with anyone. I handed him back the miner’s letter.

“Chinese?”

“The Chinese were known in those days for taking over claims that ostensibly had already been worked out and abandoned. Essentially, they reprocessed tailings. Tailings are what’s thrown away at the end of the panning or washing process—soil, gravel, sand, etcetera. Poor in gold. But the Chinese were able to make it pay. They tended to work in larger groups, so they could get through more dirt in a given time. But also they were content to settle for earning a living rather than chasing the idea of a golden jackpot.” Reynolds tapped the miner’s letter. “What this guy is saying is that if a group of Chinese had been the first to get to Empty Mile they would have worked it with the same kind of thoroughness they applied to working tailings. Consequently, the river would have been left far emptier of gold than if anyone else had worked it.”

“Do you think that’s what happened?”

“I don’t think it was more likely to be the Chinese than anyone else. The miners who got there too late were just pissed off.” He looked at his watch. “You know, Ray asked me about Empty Mile too. Maybe four, five months ago.”

“What did he want to know?”

“When it had first been prospected. He was really quite insistent about it, as though he absolutely had to tie down when the first miners got there. Came in here after a meeting one night with Gareth Rogers.”

“Really? With Gareth?”

“I know what you mean, bit of a strange combination. Your father had been coming for years but Gareth was a rather short-lived member. I think he joined about six months ago, came for a while, then stopped. I haven’t seen him here for about three months. Ray kept coming, though, until …” Chris looked embarrassed that he’d raised the issue of my father’s disappearance and continued quickly. “They seemed to share an interest in Empty Mile. The Swallow River is, after all, Oakridge’s claim to Gold Rush fame.”

“What did you tell them?”

“Showed them that letter.” Reynolds looked at his watch again and stood. “Time for the meeting. You’re going to stay?”

I could tell Marla wanted to go, and I had no great desire to sit on a hard seat and listen to a bunch of eccentrics discuss how to find gold, so I made an excuse and said we had to leave. Reynolds looked a little disappointed, as though perhaps the Elephant Society was suffering a dwindling membership and he had hoped I might sign up.

As Marla and I were preparing to leave, Reynolds pulled open a draw in his desk and took out a diary with hard blue covers. He flipped pages for a moment and then made a sound as he came to what he was looking for.

“I don’t know if it’s of any use but the only other thing I remember Ray—and Gareth too—showing more interest in than usual was a particular lecture we had here around that time. We have it on again at next week’s meeting if you’re interested. ‘Geological Reengineering Through Topographical Catastrophe.’”

I must have looked a somewhat disbelieving because he smiled a little.

“Randolph Morris, the man who gives the lecture, is, ah, serious about his subject. He repeats it every six months.”

I couldn’t see how a lecture with such a title would reveal anything to me about Empty Mile, but it was an opportunity to leave with a little grace, so I said I’d attend. Reynolds looked happier and shook my hand.

It was just after eight p.m. when Marla and I stepped out onto the street. The sky was a milky phosphorescence, not yet fully dark, and the air smelled of the still-warm bricks the buildings on that block were built from.

“Did you know my father and Gareth were friends?”

“Being interested in the same thing doesn’t make them friends. I can’t see Ray wanting to spend much time with Gareth.”

“Gareth says they were. He told me they used to go panning together. Did my father ever say anything about that?”

“No.”

“How about at the meetings you went to? Did you see them together?”

“I went for a few months about a year ago. According to Chris, Gareth didn’t start going until six months later.”

“But you saw my father there?”

“Yeah. And no, he didn’t say anything about Empty Mile.”

Marla came back to stay the night at my place. I was hoping I’d be able to turn off, to put Stan to bed then climb into my own with Marla and for a few hours at least not worry about Empty Mile, or losing the house, or Plantasaurus going down the drain. But when we got home Stan was standing in the middle of the kitchen floor stripped to the waist, the front of his body dotted with moths. He was holding his arms straight out from his sides and staring intently at the black mirror of the kitchen window. When he heard us enter the room he dropped his arms with a groan of relief, as though he’d been holding them that way a long time.

He’d used adhesive tape to attach the moths to his chest and stomach and arms. I counted sixteen of them. One or two moved a leg or wing where their bodies stuck out beyond the tape, but most were still. There were smudges of moth-down around some of the larger ones. Under the hard light of the kitchen Stan’s body looked pale against the dark marks of the insects. He seemed dazed.

Marla sat down and just stared at him. I peeled a moth from his chest.

“These have to come off.”

“I imagined the window was the barrier, the edge of the world. I tried to make the power come across. I used to be a super-brain.”

“You’re still a smart guy.”