Matthew Stokoe - Empty Mile

In the morning, after Marla had gone to work and Stan and I were still cranking up for the day, the mail came. Among the usual junk from supermarkets and electronics stores there was a single window envelope. I opened it while Stan was upstairs in the bathroom cleaning his teeth and combing Brylcreem through his hair. It was a form letter from one of the banks in town, addressed to my father, and it said that payment on the mortgage for the house was overdue.

Two things went through my mind in quick succession. First, that it must be a mistake. My father, as far as I knew, owed nothing on the house. The small life insurance policy when my mother died had enabled him to get enough of a jump on it to close out the debt a year or so before I returned to Oakridge. He’d told me so in an e-mail while I was in London. The second was the realization, whether the threat to the house was real or not, that I was now solely responsible for Stan, for the place he lived in, the food he ate, the clothes he wore… My father was no longer here to cover what it cost for him to survive in the world.

I called the bank and got an emergency slot with one of their customer service people that morning. Before Stan and I headed into town to keep the appointment I filled a cardboard folder with various papers-our copy of the missing persons report, my father’s bank account details, his passport, a statement by Detective Patterson attesting to his disappearance…

The bank was air-conditioned and the cubicle we were shown into had a small octagonal aquarium of goldfish in one corner. Stan and I sat on padded vinyl chairs across a low table from a bank guy who had a name plate clipped to his shirt pocket that said he was a loan officer and that his name was Peter.

I showed him the contents of my folder to prove I had a right to the information I was asking for and after he’d called Patterson to confirm things he spent a couple of minutes checking records on his computer. Stan sat very straight in his chair. Every so often he glanced worriedly over at me. His hand rested against the top of his thigh and beneath it he held a matchbox. I saw that he’d pushed it open a crack.

Peter looked up from his computer and spoke earnestly. “It’s true that at one point your father had paid off the house. But two months ago he remortgaged it in order to buy a piece of land at a place on the Swallow called Empty Mile. The house was the only collateral he had.”

“How much?”

“Two hundred and fifty thousand.”

“We owe two hundred and fifty thousand dollars?”

“Your father does.”

“But he’s disappeared, he might not even be alive anymore. How can you expect him to make payments on a loan?”

“We’re a bank, that’s what we do. We lend money on the expectation that it’s going to be paid back.”

“But that means we’re going to lose the house.”

“It’s brutal, I know.” He paused for a moment and softened a little. “In the final analysis all the bank cares about is that the debt gets serviced. It’s immaterial to us whether your father makes the payments or someone else does. This might be an option for you. Though you should know that he took this mortgage out over a much shorter period than usual-ten years. Possibly because of his age. The payments are proportionally higher as a result.”

“There is no way we can make payments whatever level they’re at. No way at all. We’ve just started a small business, we have virtually no income.”

“Do you have any assets?”

I was about to say no when I remembered that I was now technically the owner of the land at Empty Mile. I told Peter about the transfer of title.

He nodded and thought for a moment, then cleared his throat. “Okay. Given the situation with your father I’m sure we can put the payments on hold for a few weeks to give you some thinking room. But what it’s going to come down to is one of four options. You make the mortgage payments; you don’t make the payments and the bank forces a mortgagee sale of the house; you make payments until your father is officially declared dead and you can then legally sell the house yourself; or you sell the Empty Mile land and, if it realizes sufficient funds, you pay off the mortgage and keep the house.”

“Jesus.”

Stan reached over and tugged at my sleeve. “We gotta keep the house, Johnny.”

Peter made an unhappy face. “It’s a horrible situation. But unless your father reappears there really are only a set number of outcomes.”

He walked us to the bank’s front door. As it slid open he put his hand against the back of my shoulder.

“I’ll see what we can do about that freeze.”

And then Stan and I were outside on the sidewalk again in the sun and the heat with people passing by. Stan lifted the matchbox he was holding to his nose and breathed deeply.

“What’s that?”

“We don’t have enough power, Johnny.”

“Let me see.”

He handed over the box. I pushed it a little further open and saw two silvery-brown moths fluttering limply inside.

“Don’t be mad, Johnny, okay? Please?”

I closed the box and gave it back to him and we worked through another day at our plant business.

If I hadn’t been so worried about money I wouldn’t have accepted Gareth’s second offer of prostitute driving work. Plantasaurus, though it was gathering momentum and gaining new customers every few days, was not yet covering costs and our expenses were being met out of what dwindling savings Stan and I had left. On top of this there was the fresh financial wound of the house mortgage. The bank had given us a one-month freeze on the loan, but after that I’d either have to start making payments or show that plans were underway to sell the Empty Mile land. So when Gareth called and offered his standard fifty dollars it seemed stupid to turn the money down.

Around nine p.m. I got into the pickup and headed for Gareth’s place at Tunney Lake. I left Stan watching TV in the living room. He said it would creep him out to go to bed while there was no one else in the house so he was going to stay up till I got home.

At the lake only the office and the last cabin in the row showed any light. As I pulled up, the office door opened and Gareth stepped out onto the porch and stood there waiting while I walked over to him. By the light of the overhead bulb I could see that he was smiling.

“Thanks for helping out again, dude.”

“No problem. End cabin?”

Gareth stayed smiling but he shook his head slowly. “Nope. I have her right here.”

He reached for someone out of sight behind him in the office and pulled. Whoever it was seemed to be resisting him and he had to half turn to exert more strength before he could pull her out through the doorway.

When he did, I felt something run through me that I had not experienced since I’d seen Stan laid out at the edge of the lake twelve years before-a sensation of my insides draining in a rush down through my body and out. For an instant I thought I might not be able to stay standing. Because the girl who now stood beside Gareth was Marla.

“What’s going on?”

“Just what we talked about, dude. Easy money for you, even more easy money for me. Special request from a new customer.”

Gareth let go of Marla’s arm and gave her a small shove. She stepped down off the porch and walked quickly to my truck. She had her eyes on the ground and she didn’t look up as she passed me. I heard her climb inside and close the door.

“Is this a joke?”

“It’s business.”

“You expect me to take Marla so some guy can fuck her?”

“What’s the problem? It isn’t the first time she’s done it.”