Empty Mile (5 page)

“Yeah, and we’ll need a place to store our plants. Like a warehouse or something.”

“You’re serious about this?”

“Serious as a heart attack. Don’t you think it’s a good idea?”

“I think it’s a lot to think about. You can’t just start doing something like that.”

“Why not?”

“You’ve got to arrange things, put things in place. Think it all through.”

“All you gotta do, Johnny, is just start doing it.”

“Stan—”

“What are we driving?”

“A car.”

“A pickup. So we don’t need a van. There’s a place in Burton we can buy planters from, and I can ask Bill where to buy plants. We don’t need an office, but we do have to have a place to keep the plants and Bill has that other warehouse he doesn’t use. He’d let us use it, I bet he would.”

“He’d let us rent it, you mean.”

Stan rolled his eyes like I was splitting hairs.

“No, Stan, it’s important. All this stuff has to be paid for.

It isn’t free, you know.”

“I know that, Johnny. I’ve been saving all my pay, Dad told me I had to. I’ve got almost nine thousand dollars.”

“You’re joking.”

“That’s what I’ve got.”

“I don’t know if it’d be enough to start a business, though.”

“But you’ve got money too, don’t you?”

“Yeah, a few grand.”

“So we could put it together. We could be businessmen. Come on, Johnny. Please? I want to be someone people say hi to on the street. Please, Johnny. If I’m a businessman people won’t think I’m so dumb.”

“You’re not dumb, don’t say that.”

“Johnny!”

“Okay, okay … Let me think about it for a while. It’s a good idea, but I need to think about it some more.”

Stan smiled and punched the air. “Yes!”

In bed that night I turned the problem over. It didn’t seem possible to me that a business could simply come into being the way Stan thought it could. Businesses, I assumed, needed detailed planning, market research, the raising of capital, prolonged evaluation of particular strategies …

In a way, though, the mechanics of starting a business weren’t the issue. Stan believed that being a “businessman” would compensate for his reduced mental capacity, that it would place him on more equal footing with the rest of society. If that was so, if there was a chance that his life could be made better or happier this way, then however naïve the attempt might be, I owed it to him to do all I could to make it happen.

It would consume our savings, and our lack of experience would probably doom the business from the start, but I had caused him to be as he was and this was my opportunity to make some small payment toward the debt of my past.

Later that night while I was still awake my door opened and Stan poked his head into the room.

“Did you think about it yet? I couldn’t get to sleep, I’m too excited. Did you think about Plantasaurus?”

“Yeah, I thought about it. Count me in, dude.”

Stan gasped. For a moment he was frozen, then he started running on the spot, shaking his hands in front of him.

“You mean it, Johnny? Really? Really?”

“But I don’t want to tell Dad about it just yet, okay? We have to be certain about things first. And before we can do anything we have to sort out that warehouse with Bill.”

“You bet, Johnny. Oh boy, my head’s spinning round!”

CHAPTER 5

W
hen I was twenty-two I was drinking too much and had already dipped my feet into the murky waters of entry-level crime, stealing cigarettes and liquor from the back rooms of stores at the edge of town and selling them to small-time hoods over in Burton.

Eventually there was an incident, a line drawn across the flow of time beyond which, for a single clear moment, I could see the future. And what I saw was the stereotypical small-town boy gone bad—cars and booze and brawls and petty crimes … all of it leading straight to some bigger crime that got me caught and sent to jail.

It was not a terrible thing that I did, not in the catalog of crimes available to human beings. But it was bad, and it was enough. I got drunk one night and stole a car from in front of someone’s house. I drove it out of town and into the forest and a mile down a fire trail I punctured its gas tank with a screwdriver and set it on fire. I watched it burn with my jaw set tight in a selfish fury at a world that had maneuvered me into hating myself so much.

When the flames died I curled up beside the wreck and listened to it tick and crack until I fell asleep. I was drunk enough to feel, before I lost consciousness, a self-righteous satisfaction at the small revenge I had wrought. But it was different in the morning. The charred stink of the car’s remains woke me and I saw what I had done. What I had really done. The booze-fueled justice of my vandalism had been replaced while I slept with a reality that was mean and vicious and petty. I had stolen someone’s car. Chances were that it was the only one they owned, that it was their largest purchase, scrimped and saved for. Chances were that it was not insured and that it would take my unknown victim months to replace.

When I told Marla what I was going to do, what I
had
to do to have any chance of finding some sort of pathway through life, she begged me not to go. She promised me everything she could think of—counseling, support, the dedication of her life to mine …

But I knew none of it would be enough and within a month I was gone from Oakridge, leaving Marla with a broken heart and her dream of a safe and normal relationship in ruins.

The second time I went around to Marla’s house after my return to Oakridge it was seven o’clock in the morning on my third day back. My father had told me she’d left waitressing and worked now for the town council, so I was pretty sure she’d be at home. I could have called first, but I was too frightened she would tell me not to come.

I knocked on the door. I could hear a radio playing inside and it crossed my mind that she might be listening to it with someone. I’d seen no evidence of a lover on my previous visit, and when I’d thought about her during my years away I’d taken it for granted that she would always be available. But it struck me now that I really had no reason to think this, that I might be about to enter a scene that could turn out to be very awkward indeed. But then, even the best-case scenario that morning was going to be anything but easy.

The radio dropped in volume. There was time to draw a breath, time to feel my blood fizzing with adrenaline, time for the pressure of an unbearable anxiety to stretch my heart. Time for me to realize I didn’t have a clue what I was going to say to her. Then the door opened.

And she was there in front of me, slim, short, her dark hair long and tied back in a ponytail. She was dressed in office clothes, but her blouse was not fully buttoned and she was wearing tired-looking Ugg boots on her feet. When she saw me her hand flew to her mouth. A second later she reached out and took a handful of my shirt and pulled me against her.

“I wondered how long it would take you to get around to me.”

She looked closely at my face, my eyes, then stepped away and walked back down the hall, calling over her shoulder for me to come in.

In the kitchen the air smelled of toast and coffee. She took a cup from beside the sink and filled it and handed it to me, then stood leaning against the counter, examining me coolly.

“You’re going gray.”

“Yeah.”

“You’ve got lines too.”

“Still me underneath.”

“The old you? Not after eight years, Johnny. I’m not the old me.”

We were silent for a long time, neither of us knowing how to swing open the great barrier of time that stood between us. Eventually I said the only thing I thought might have meaning for her.

“I’m sorry.”

A look of disbelief crossed her face. “What?”

“I know I hurt you when I left—”

“Do you know how pathetic that is? Hurt? I wasn’t hurt, I was fucking destroyed.”

“You know why I had to go. We talked about it—”

“You asshole. Don’t you dare make it sound like we had some sort of discussion. The ‘talking’ was you whining about how unhappy you were and me trying to tell you how much I loved you so you wouldn’t go. And what good did it do? Did it fix all your problems? Did it make Stan better? Did it make everything all right again?”

“No.”

“What? I didn’t hear.”

“No, it didn’t. It was a huge fucking mistake.”

Marla took a breath and let it out slowly. “Do you know how many nights I cried over you? Do you have any idea how empty I felt?”

I put my arms around her. She kept hers by her sides but she rested her head against my chest and spoke quietly.

“I knew you’d do this. Just turn up one day … Jesus Christ, I feel like I’m coming apart.”

“Do you want me to go?”

She was silent for a while. When she spoke again there was such a note of defeat in her voice I felt dirty.

“No.”

I kissed her. For a moment she responded, pressing herself against me, then she pushed away abruptly.

“Enough, Johnny! Jesus! We’re going to have to take some time about this, don’t you think?”

We sat at a small wooden table that stood against one wall of the kitchen and drank coffee and sidestepped the misery that boiled in our pasts by talking about the plain surface of our lives.

Marla told me about keeping the house on after I left, how she’d had some bad times but had turned things around a year ago when she’d landed her job as an administrative assistant for the town council. I told her about London. Twenty minutes later, as she was making her final preparations for work, I raised the subject of my father and Patricia Prentice.

“I drove by yesterday.”

“Really?”

“In the afternoon. I saw a couple of people come in here. Into the house. Their cars were parked in the driveway.”

“You aren’t the only person I know.”

“You know who they were, then?”

Marla dropped her house keys into her bag. “Just some friends.”

“Friends, huh?”

“All right. Jesus. You saw who they were.”

“You can’t blame me for being curious about what my father was doing here.”

“Why don’t you ask him?”

“As if I could ever ask him anything like that.”

“He wouldn’t want me to tell you.”

“So what?”

Marla sighed. “I rent them a room.”

“What would they want a room for? Our house is way big.”

“A room to fuck in. Okay?”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“They don’t like doing it in motels?”

“It’s more discrete here.”

“And being she’s who she is, discretion would be important.”

“You know her?”

“I met her at Stan’s work.”

Marla shrugged. “I’ve known your dad a long time. Patricia’s kind of a friend. When he asked, I couldn’t really say no. They only use it when I’m out at work.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“Six months.”

“Wow, good for him.”

“I suppose.”

“You don’t approve?”

“Pat’s not well. You see them together and you just get this feeling of desperation on her part, like he’s something she’s grabbing onto, trying stay afloat.”

We left the house. As Marla got into her car I put my hand on her arm.

“I could come back this evening, after you finish work.”

She looked at me for a moment, then shook her head slowly.

“You’re a smart guy, Johnny, but sometimes you can be fucking dumb. I have a lot of stuff to think about. When I’m done I’ll call you; until then don’t come around, okay?”

She kissed me, then she drove away.

At lunchtime I went out to the garden center and Stan and I had a short meeting with Bill Prentice about leasing his unused warehouse. He said he’d think about it and get back to us in a few days.

CHAPTER 6

T
hat Saturday we had a family outing. My father drove Stan and I out of Oakridge and into the hills. The forest was sparser here and ran down into gullies and small valleys. It was a hot day and the air had the dusty smell of dry pine and thirsty soil.

We parked in a clearing that was already full of 4x4s and pickups. A walking track led downhill and, carrying gold pans, a shovel, and a backpack of food, we followed it for ten minutes through land that was as much a wilderness as it had been two or three hundred years before.

Halfway along the trail Stan stopped by a fir tree and leaned against it. He reached his arms around as much of the trunk as he could and took a long slow breath through his nose.

“Stan, what are you doing?”

The annoyance in my father’s voice came more, I think, from his discomfort at Stan’s display of intimacy than from any delay to our progress. Stan didn’t answer him. He had his eyes closed.

“I can feel it, Johnny.”

“What?”

“The power. Sometimes trees can bring it across.”

I looked at my father for an explanation but he just gave an irritated shake of the head and carried on along the trail. I said to Stan, “Native Americans used to hug trees for energy when they were tired.”

“I know that.” Stan turned his head and smiled at me. “Everyone knows that.”

The Forty-Niners, after they had made the trek across the continent by wagon train, or sailed into San Francisco and then hiked to the rivers and streams inland and had at last washed their first payable amount of gold, would write to family back home that they had “seen the elephant.”

It was a description crazy enough to suit the desperate men they were and it suited the members of the Oakridge Elephant Society just as well. If you wanted a laugh, if you wanted to see the kind of whackos and crackpots that people in big cities make jokes about, then the Society was a good place to start. Oakridge had begun life in 1849 as a placer mining encampment on the banks of the Swallow River and this group of gold-prospecting enthusiasts couldn’t shake the heritage. They suffered a common addiction to the notion that somewhere, in some creek or stretch of river, there was still enough gold dust to make a man rich. All the history books said Northern California had been mined out a hundred and fifty years ago, but the members of the Elephant Society didn’t always believe what they read.

They met each week in a hall above a drugstore in Back Town. They held jobs and raised families, but on weekends they took their pans and shovels and drove out to the hills to someplace they were certain the Gold Rush had missed.

They did find gold sometimes, what they called “color” as it lay mixed with black magnetic sands at the bottom of their pans, but most of the time it was only enough to refine and seal in a glass vial and pass around as an object of interest at Society meetings.

My father had his own collection of these vials, accumulated over twenty years. They stood in a line on a shelf in our living room, a tantalizing hint of American wealth, wealth which had never yet come his way. And it was to bolster himself against a declining belief that he would ever hit the financial mother lode, I think, that he’d joined the Society a couple of years before I left Oakridge. It was a place where the dreams of others could support his own.

The recreation area the Elephant Society had chosen for its annual summer picnic bordered a level stretch of river bank that had been, as most picnic destinations around Oakridge were, the site of a Gold Rush diggings. The place was too far from town to see much use and the grass had grown long and there were small yellow flowers scattered through it.

Membership of the Society was not high and with kids and wives thrown in there were only about a hundred and fifty people in the clearing. They were grouped in separate family units but they waved to each other and went over and said hi and tossed cans of beer around. It was friendly without being invasive. I could see how a man like my father, who was anything but a social animal, could find it bearable.

He greeted several of the families as we passed them and people stood up and shook hands with him. He seemed genuinely pleased with the contact and there was something touching about the way he laughed and spoke, something a little shy and holding back, as though he felt like an impostor doing it. It made me see how thoroughly lonely he must have been, this man who had to do battle with himself each day to force the emotional responses most others took for granted.

We spread our picnic rug out and sat and ate and talked about times in the past. My father could have had any number of reasons for taking us there that day, but I saw in the anecdotes and the paper plates of food an expression of his need to reach back to the memories of other picnics, other outings like this when we had been more of a family. When life had not yet done its dirty work. What he wanted, what the three of us wanted, was confirmation that there had indeed been a shared happiness in our pasts. At least at some point.

While we were eating, Bill Prentice turned up on a quad bike he must have trailered to the parking area. He wasn’t a member of the Elephant Society, but he was on the town council and council members were elected, so smart council members made friends in every social and business organization they could. Bill had brought several crates of beer with him. After he’d unloaded them and called out for people to help themselves, he started giving kids rides on the back of his bike. My father did his best to appear disinterested.

After Stan had run over and taken a turn on the bike the three of us went panning. Many of the adults were already ranged along the edge of the river. We found a spot among them and crouched over our pans, throwing in sand then sluicing in a little water and gently rolling the mixture, over and over, until the lighter sediment had spilled off, leaving a curve of fine sand that could be made to reveal … But there was no gold in this river anymore and the Elephant Society was panning only to express its identity.

Stan and I had been panning many times with my father when we were boys so today was nothing new for us and knowing there was no chance of finding anything in this impoverished riverbed made it a pointless exercise for me. But I stayed at it, squatting there beside my father, swirling dirt and water around in a circle, because this quiet crouching together, this time that did not need too many words, was the closest we could get to each other.

Stan gave up after ten minutes and sat with his bare feet in the shallows of the river. His pan held nothing but water and he tilted it in a slow rhythm, side to side, so that its unbroken surface caught the light and threw it back across his face in a bright pulse. He was dazzling himself with the reflection and behind his glasses his eyes were unfocused and wide.

Behind us, Bill Prentice now had a girl at the end of her teens with him on the bike. She wore a tight T-shirt and a short tartan tennis skirt which flapped back over tanned thighs.

Twenty minutes later my father stopped panning and stood up. The movement snapped Stan out of his daydream.

“Can me and Johnny go exploring in the woods?”

“If John wants to; it’s too dangerous by yourself.”

Stan and I walked away from the river, back through the picnic area toward the bordering forest. The quad bike stood riderless and quiet now beneath a tree. On the other side of the grassed area my father lay down on the rug and tented a paperback novel over his face. One or two of the families were packing up to go home.

A number of narrow trails led away from the recreation area. Stan and I took the first one we came to.

“Here we go, Johnny. Lock and load.”

“Lock and load?”

“Danger lurks everywhere.”

“Really?”

Stan made a face like I was an idiot. “It’s TV, Johnny. Boy, I wish I had a costume.”

Almost immediately the forest closed about us. Stan leapt around on the trail like he was on a special forces mission. When he stopped to catch his breath I asked him what he’d meant by “power” when he’d hugged the tree earlier that afternoon.

He shrugged. “Just power.”

“Yeah, but electrical power, gas turbine power, what?”

“It’s everywhere, Johnny. It’s behind things. We can’t reach through to it, but it’s there and it comes across, like it’s just on the other side of everything we can see.”

“How’d you come up with that?”

“When I drowned. When I woke up I just knew it.”

We followed the trail for about ten minutes. It sloped gradually down into a gully then turned to the right behind an outcrop of rock. Beyond this it continued along the bed of the gully and lost itself in thickening trees that looked gloomy and vaguely threatening. What held my attention, though, as we made the turn, was not the sinister nature of the trees, but Bill Prentice’s naked buttocks, luminous in the middle of the trail about twenty yards further along. Crouched in front of him, her face hidden by his ass, was the slim girl in the tartan skirt.

Stan gave a short gasp of amazement and quickly clamped his hand over his mouth. The obvious course of action was to turn around before they realized we were there and go quietly back the way we’d come. I was just starting to do this when Stan jerked my arm sharply and pointed to the opposite slope of the gully where a black bear was padding its way between the trees. It wasn’t a large animal, about three and a half feet from foot to shoulder, but out there in the woods with no bars to keep it at a distance and make it cute it was an extraordinarily frightening sight.

The bear had seen Bill and the girl and was moving slowly down the slope toward them. For a moment Stan and I did nothing, frozen in a crazy moment where it was impossible to tell what the right thing to do was. Should we yell a warning and risk spooking the bear into attacking? Or should we stay quiet and hope it turned back into the forest?

The girl solved the dilemma for us. The black shape lolling through the trees must have tweaked her peripheral vision because she jerked her head away from Bill’s crotch and shrieked like she was in a horror movie. Bill jumped backwards, grabbing at his pants, looking wildly about for what he must have thought was the arrival of some angry parent. When he saw Stan and me he seemed puzzled, as though he couldn’t match the severity of the girl’s reaction to our presence. By then she was on her feet and racing up the trail. As she passed me she twisted her head over her shoulder and screamed one word, “Bear!”

Bill saw the animal then. He backed into a hollow of trees at the side of the trail and grabbed a fallen branch, holding it out in front of him like some sort of leafy broom. The bear was ten yards away from him now and had only a small patch of ground and the trail to cross. I started picking up rocks to use as ammunition. Stan stared at the bear as if he was trying to calculate its weight.

When I straightened again the bear had come to a stop in front of Bill just a few feet beyond the reach of his branch. Bill’s face was drained of color but he did not look weak standing there with his puny weapon. He hadn’t crumbled.

The bear wrinkled its snout and sniffed the air, moving its head through a swinging half-circle. It sat back on its haunches and raised its front paws.

The first rock I threw hit it on its flank, the second bounced off its shoulder. The animal stretched its neck forward and made a hoarse braying noise, then fell forward on all fours again. I could see the canine teeth of its lower jaw. Bill shouted at me, “Stop! You’re pissing it off.”

“It looks pretty pissed off already.”

“We gotta scare it away, not make it so mad it attacks. Get a branch. Three of us should be too much for it.”

Stan and I found a couple of long sticks at the side of the trail. For a moment I stood wondering if it was really such a good idea to go charging at an angry bear, but Stan didn’t hesitate. As soon as he had his weapon he went careening down the hill screaming and yelling and waving his arms about, 200 pounds of stout heart and soft flesh and greased-back black hair. With him on his way I had no choice but to follow.

The bear half turned to meet us, but Stan did not stop. He ran to within five feet of the animal and stood his ground, whipping his stick wildly about and shouting “Git!” and “Yah!” and “Go away, bear!” The bear, faced now with an enemy on two fronts, swung back and forth, rocking on the large pads of its forefeet, baying its anger at this sudden outnumbering. Bill, seeing the animal’s attention was split, stepped out of his hollow and began yelling and thrashing his branch about as wildly as Stan.

For a moment I thought the bear might pick one of us to attack out of sheer frustration, but after swiping once or twice at the leaves flicking in front of its face, it turned abruptly and bounded off a few paces. It stopped once to look back at us over its shoulder, then loped away into the trees and disappeared up the far side of the gully.

Bill dropped his branch and without a word stepped forward and hugged both of us.

“Well, that was something.”

Stan made a face of exaggerated horror. “I thought you were a goner, Bill.”